The retooling of American manufacturing Available to Purchase

In his book, Unlimited Wealth, Paul Pilzer defines economics as the way society allocates scarce resources. The world’s natural resources are in the form of a pie, and how you slice it is economics. For years theory said there was a limited amount of these resources and the nation that controlled them controlled the world’s wealth. Over the centuries, this view of the world has been responsible for innumerable wars, revolutions, political movements, government policies, business strategies, and possibly a religion or two. Fundamental to this viewpoint is that life is a zero-sum game. If there are limited resources, one person’s gain must be another person’s loss. The factor that most economists have overlooked is that of technology. That may be the reason that economists have such a hard time agreeing on future predictions. In 1949 Harry Truman listened intently to an economic briefing on the economy and at the conclusion asked, “From your report I take it that interest rates should be 5% next year?” The economist replied, “well on the other hand,” Truman stopped him and said, “What this country needs is a good one-handed economist.” Technology has given us the ability to create great wealth where little existed before. In fact, for the past few decades, it has been the been the backlog of unimplemented technological advances, rather than unused physical resources, that has been the detriment to real growth. Pilzer states that there is no scarcity, but unlimited resources, all driven by technology. Long before we deplete a resource, we abandon it in favor of a better alternative. In the 18th century a key natural resource was whale oil, which gave way to coal in the 19th century, and to fossil fuel in the 20th century. Technology is accelerating at a non linear rate because it builds upon itself For this reason, cycles that took sixty years are now happening in six, and this cycle time will continue to decrease in the future.