Posted on 05/24/2008 5:48:48 AM PDT by shove_it
MIT researchers point to potential economy-boosting technologies
As the economy appears to falter and as more Americans fear that the country is on the wrong track, here's something to keep in mind: There is hope on the horizon.
History is filled with examples of how technology helped usher in new eras of prosperity. The rise of the Internet is a good case in point: Few people who experienced the economic recession of the early 1990s could have foreseen how the Web and related information technologies would improve their lives and unleash whole new industries within a few short years.
To help build the case for optimism, the MIT News Office asked a collection of MIT faculty and researchers for their thoughts on the potentially life-altering technologies that lie just around the corner. Here's a sample of what they said:
Bioengineering | Biosolar Cells | Digital Fabrication | Education | Electrochemical Energy | Embedded Electronics | Fusion | Life Extension |Mitigating Autism | Problem Solving | Robots | Sustainable Cities | Transcending Technology
(Excerpt) Read more at web.mit.edu ...
The beauty of being on the “wrong track” is the “unintended consequences express train” doesn’t kill you when it goes screaming by...
You’re gonna love this one:
Transcending technology
When the MIT News Office asked Rebecca Henderson for her thoughts, she replied that she did not necessarily agree with the premise. Henderson foresees significant social, political and environmental stresses around the world in the coming years—challenges that technology will not be able to fix by itself.
Rebecca Henderson
We need to make investments now.But if you remember back to the 1990s, it wasn't govt investment that fueled the boom, or people telling us we "need to make investments now" but actual technology actually taking the marketplace by storm.
Show us the technology. The money will naturally follow. We don't "need" to do anything, except get the government off the backs of producers, creators and developers. (AND oil-drillers!)
>> Show us the technology. The money will naturally follow. We don’t “need” to do anything, except get the government off the backs of producers, creators and developers. (AND oil-drillers!)
Good points.
There are two ways to look at the current situation.
Since WWII, the answer has always been that we can grow the economy out of problems.
But the body now weighs 1000 pounds and is confined to its bed. Eating more isn’t going to help. And as usual, the dumb Democrat idea to eat even faster definitely won’t help.
We need a healthier diet in the long run, but right now we are so unhealthy that we need surgery. Start by cutting out huge sheets of fat and excess skin, and put ourselves on a healthy diet. And I don’t mean tofu and bean sprouts.
The massive weight in the analogy is leveraged credit. At all levels, it is killing us. At the government level it has given us a massive debt that must be surged away. Down to the individual level, citizens are stuck with enormous individual debt, which must be purged as well.
So at the government level, the surgery is a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget including a strict debt repayment schedule. It also means that the size of the federal government, and the illegitimate authority it has taken unto itself, must be slashed.
At the corporate and individual level, it means a return to what was once a familiar expression: “Credit is for those who don’t need credit.”
Leveraged credit has created the same problem today that buying stocks on margin caused in the stock market crash of 1929.
Certainly our economy will have the brakes slammed on. It will appear to be just a fraction of its size, say 200 lbs, and look scrawny in comparison to the vast blob it used to be. But it will be able to walk again and take care of itself. It will be far healthier once all that superfluous weight is gone.
And most importantly, it will run circles around all the other blobs in the world.
Transcending technology by Rebecca Henderson....
AMAZING how all the technical engineering types see hope and exciting possibilities in the future BUT the one social/liberal sees nothing but doom and gloom.
Herein lies the difference in world view between conservatives and progressives liberals.The terms are the opposite of what they should be since conservatives are much more optimistic risk takers while the so called progressives are pessimistic whiners.
that’s the difference between capitalism and communism.
the former cultures are optimistic in the face of adversity.
the latter are fear mongers, depressed and back biting.
Yeah. Ms. Henderson’s negative ramblings go beyond the space available for who knows how much longer. I’ll bet she was not happy about the editing of her important views.
A friend’s son is getting a tax- and tuition-free ride through graduate school at MIT - majoring in economics in a combination of grants and allowances. Amazing. Of course, he is all in favor of socialized healthcare, mandatory insurance and government economic ‘guidance’ using tax policy and incentives.
It comes as no surprise that he believes the answer to all economic and market problems can be found in big government regulation. He is a firm believer in the mASSachusetts mandatory insurance laws and says all of the reports that the costs are already running far ahead of the forecasts is just media hype because all the MIT economic ‘models’ show a fully-funded plan. Of course, the models are correct while quantitative data to the contrary are wrong. He is well on his way to a career in academia or government!
A friend’s son is getting a tax- and tuition-free ride through graduate school at MIT - majoring in economics in a combination of grants and allowances. Amazing. Of course, he is all in favor of socialized healthcare, mandatory insurance and government economic ‘guidance’ using tax policy and incentives.
It comes as no surprise that he believes the answer to all economic and market problems can be found in big government regulation. He is a firm believer in the mASSachusetts mandatory insurance laws and says all of the reports that the costs are already running far ahead of the forecasts is just media hype because all the MIT economic ‘models’ show a fully-funded plan. Of course, the models are correct while quantitative data to the contrary are wrong. He is well on his way to a career in academia or government!
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