Consider that in 1870, most homes were lit by candles and whale oil lamps. To use the bathroom, your choice was an outhouse or a chamber pot. Your world was confined to the distance your horse could travel. You would spend long hours of your short life doing backbreaking labor, owning only two changes of clothes, and eating a whole lot of pork and grain mush.
.. What really amazed me was not the speed of innovation but the speed of adoption. In 1910, there were 2.3 motor vehicle registrations for every 100 households. By 1930, there were eighty-nine.
.. Gordon’s premise is that what he calls the third industrial revolution, the one driven by computers and digitalization, is limited to communication, information, and entertainment. I believe it’s far broader than that.
.. The digital revolution affects the very mechanism of the marketplace. How buyers and sellers find each other, how we amass information, how we can create models to simulate things before building them, how scientists collaborate across continents, how we learn new things—all of this has changed dramatically thanks to digital innovation.
.. The truth is, while economic measurements like TFP can be useful for understanding the impact of a tractor or a refrigerator, they are much less useful for understanding the impact of Wikipedia or Airbnb.
.. In the future, GDP may not grow as fast as it did in the past—or, for all we know, it may—but that alone doesn’t tell you whether people’s lives are going to get better... Think of a cure for Alzheimer’s. That disease costs the U.S. $236 billion per year, mostly to Medicare and Medicaid. A cure would immediately alter the budget of every state in the country, not to mention millions of lives... Reducing inequality and making sure every child in the country is ready for college and the workforce has been a major focus of our foundation’s U.S. Program. But America had problems with inequality and education in the past, and they didn’t prevent great inventions from having a big impact.
How Clinton Could Knock Trump Out
And that leads to my second reason for pushing Clinton to inject some capitalism into her economic plan: The coalition she could lead. If there is one thing that is not going to revive growth right now, it is an anti-trade, regulatory heavy, socialist-lite agenda the Democratic Party has drifted to under the sway of Bernie Sanders. Socialism is the greatest system ever invented for making people equally poor.
.. I get that she had to lean toward Sanders and his voters to win the nomination; their concerns with fairness and inequality are honorable. But those concerns can be addressed only with economic growth; the rising anti-immigration sentiments in the country can be defused only with economic growth; the general anxiety feeding Trumpism can be eased only with economic growth.
.. It’s time that Hillary pivoted. The country today doesn’t need the first female president. It needs the first president in a long time who can govern with a center-left, center-right coalition, and actually end the gridlock on fiscal policy in a smart way.
What Caused the Turkish Coup Attempt
Gulen has lived in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, and the Turkish government is now accusing Washington of sheltering him—which provides the government with an opportunity to deflect attention away from its own actions.
.. The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is devoted to a view that emphasizes the right of majority rule over concepts of shared control by institutions within a constitutional system. His views are similar but not identical with the Muslim Brotherhood theory of government which does not recognize freedom of press, individual rights against the state, the separation of powers or a clear division between state and religion.
.. —The government accelerated moves in recent years to take over newspapers, TV stations and media outlets, resulting in almost total control of the media by the government;
—In the summer of 2013, the government forcibly repressed peaceful demonstrations nationwide against perceived government authoritarianism;
.. —Changes in Turkey’s educational system have introduced compulsory religious instruction and altered the governance of schools and universities in ways that weaken the secular nature of education.
.. In 1999, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a young politician with religious convictions and regarded as a successful mayor of Istanbul, one of the world’s largest cities, went to jail. He had publicly proclaimed an inflammatory reference to a Turkish poem: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”
.. In 2001, the Turkish economy imploded with the Turkish currency losing half its value within a few months. Thus, after a decade of bumbling misrule by secular parties, in 2002 the Turkish people, in essence realizing there was no other option, put Erdogan’s party in power with a powerful win.
.. Turkey, rigorously implemented economic reforms that slashed rampant inflation and launched new efforts to join the EU. It did what no previous government had been able to do for decades. Turkey’s GNP tripled within a few years.
.. In succeeding years, he converted the educational system into a religious friendly institution, altered the court system to his advantage, purged the police and judiciary, and with widespread show trials decapitated the Kemalist structure in the army. Extending that momentum, his party moved to dominate the press in Turkey.
Where machines could replace humans—and where they can’t (yet)
Because of the prevalence of such predictable physical work, some 59 percent of all manufacturing activities could be automated, given technical considerations. The overall technical feasibility, however, masks considerable variance. Within manufacturing, 90 percent of what welders, cutters, solderers, and brazers do, for example, has the technical potential for automation, but for customer-service representatives that feasibility is below 30 percent.
.. Manufacturing, for all its technical potential, is only the second most readily automatable sector in the US economy. A service sector occupies the top spot: accommodations and food service, where almost half of all labor time involves predictable physical activities and the operation of machinery—including preparing, cooking, or serving food; cleaning food-preparation areas; preparing hot and cold beverages; and collecting dirty dishes. According to our analysis, 73 percent of the activities workers perform in food service and accommodations have the potential for automation, based on technical considerations.
.. Retailing is another sector with a high technical potential for automation. We estimate that 53 percent of its activities are automatable, though, as in manufacturing, much depends on the specific occupation within the sector.