Bret Swanson
"Great Stagnation or Technological Renaissance?"
Friday, September 25
STEW 214 CD: 11:30 - 12:30 PM
Measuring the impact of the information economy is difficult. By some intuitive measures, the power of information technology seems almost miraculous. By many orthodox measures, however, it seems tepid. We encountered this paradox in the 1980s when Robert Solow famously noted that “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Computers finally flowed through to the data during the brief productivity boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The conventional view that median incomes have stagnated for the last four decades, however, runs counter to a presumption that Moore’s law, now 50 years old, should have substantially improved living standards.
In 2011, George Mason economist Tyler Cowen ignited the debate with his book The Great Stagnation, which argued that the Internet was a great source of “cheap fun” but not jobs or incomes. Paul Krugman in 1998 had famously said that by 2005 we would view the Internet as no more important than the fax machine. With “The Demise of U.S. Economic Growth” in 2012, Northwestern’s Robert Gordon drew an even darker picture.
And yet according to The Wall Street Journal, 66 American startup firms are worth more than a billion dollars. The market values of just seven publicly traded tech leaders — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, and Amazon — total nearly $2.38 trillion, more than the entire value of the German or Australian stock markets. Some believe technology is so powerful that "robots are taking all the jobs."
What is the true state of American technology and its impact across the economy? What are prospects for American innovation? And what are the key public policy decisions that will help define America's technology future?
Bio: Bret Swanson is president of Entropy Economics, a research firm focused on technology and the global economy, and of Entropy Capital, a venture firm that invests in early-stage technology companies. He is also a scholar at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy.
He previously was a senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, where he directed the Center for Global Innovation, and for eight years advised technology investors as executive editor of the Gilder Technology Report.
Today, Swanson presents his “exaflood” research across the globe, writes a column for Forbes, blogs at TechPolicyDaily.com, and often contributes to the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal on topics ranging from broadband networks to China to monetary policy. Swanson is also a trustee and vice chair of the Indiana Public Retirement System (INPRS).
Swanson studies innovation, globalization, China, Internet traffic, information theory, the stock market, and entrepreneurial economics. He is guided by the Laws of Say, Metcalfe, and Moore, the Theorem of Shannon, and the Curve of Laffer. His most pioneering and speculative research, however, concerns forces even more powerful and enigmatic — his four young children.