« Brad DeLong: Looking in the Encyclopedia | Main | Three Ways of Looking at the Government's Debt-Sustainability Transversality Condition »

06/04/2013

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

thibaud

Spot on. Superb analysis, and a nice aside about Asimov and driverless cars.

Just to underscore your point re. infotech's declining returns, the industry grew at s.t. like 17% annually from 1980 to 2000, and has been near flat since then. For every Google or Facebook, you have an HP or a Dell or a Sun Microsystems that is hemorrhaging jobs and achieving negative returns on their invested capital. And Facebook too is such a completely useless destination that it will probably go the way of MySpace before the decade's out.

As to healthcare, though, aren't things like energy, housing, food production etc still going to receive huge attention and focus from governments? Maybe fat and affluent America (and Europe, Japan, Oz/Canada) will focus on healthcare, but I don't see China Russia India Brazil Turkey South Africa etc focusing on healthcare more than on energy, food, construction.

Perhaps there will be two different models emerging in which the technologically advanced nations (this includes S. Korea) pour increasing amounts of investment into biotech and other healthcare advances while the BRICs and the rest take the resulting products (legally or otherwise) and apply them to their own aging societies...

The comments to this entry are closed.