(2013-01-05) Kelly Post Productive Economy

Kevin Kelly questions Robert Gordon's thinking about a Great Stagnation.

*The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. To them, this is not a hypothetical choice at all, but a real one. and they have made their decision in massive numbers... they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water... So if people value the benefits of computers and internet so much why don't we see this value reflected in the growth of the US economy?

I think the key sentence in Gordon's paper is this: "Both the first two revolutions required about 100 years for their full effects to percolate through the economy.".. The 3rd Industrial Revolution (Technological Revolution) is not really computers and the internet, it is the networking of everything. And in that regime we are just at the beginning of the beginning.

Finally, Gordon is focused, as most economists, on GDP which measures the amount of "labor saving" that has been accomplished... I think the real wealth in the future does not come from saving labor but in creating new kinds of things to do.

The main accomplishment of this 3rd Industrialization, the networking of our brains, other brains and other things, is to add something onto the substrate of productivity. Call it consumptity, or generativity (Generative)... The are two senses of growth: scale, that is, more, bigger, faster; and Evolution.*