Posted on 03/07/2014 11:50:20 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The growth rate of high-tech investments has slowed dramatically over the past 10 years, especially since the Great Recession.
Everyone has a pet theory explaining why the economic recovery has been so weak, but here’s one overlooked factor: The productivity revolution driven by computers, software and the Internet is fading, and nothing has yet emerged to take its place as an engine of growth.
For all of the incessant buzz in the markets about the latest tech start-up, few businesses are investing much in high-tech equipment or software. Investments in information processing equipment and software are growing at the slowest pace in decades, just a fraction of the booming growth rates of the late 1990s. See the Bureau of Economc Analysis data.
High-tech investments were a major driver of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s. Businesses were spending a lot on new equipment, software and research, and those investments were paying off by boosting output.
(VIDEO-AT-LINK)
But now 60 years of electronics-led productivity could be grinding to a halt. The slowdown in high-tech investment today means a slower growing economy tomorrow.....
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
People don’t usually see the next tech revolution coming. Keep your eye on 3D printing. Why build giant factories to build stuff when in can be printed in a garage? Why have inventory and just in time delivery when stuff can be printed on the spot as needed? What does that do to retailers?
Everybody see's 3D printing coming. If it's the next tech revolution, it would be unusual in this respect.
Click on the keyword “3D Printing” here and you’ll see many threads.
Knowing obama, he will have us working for the robots.
A point to note.
The graph shows the RATE OF GROWTH. Absolute numbers are at records; it is just that the rate of growth is slowing. But this is inevitable with the LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS,
IOW, nothing really shocking here.
The government, which is now 80% liberal, is trying to drive us to a feudal economy and lifestyle where the average citizen walks to his subsistence job and steps off the path to tug his forelock as our masters motor by in air-conditioned comfort. They want us in “sustainable” slums with everything in walking distance. I own a car that gets 40 mpg and it cost $5 just to go into town and back. Insurance and taxes are killing any tech market we might have, as they have killed housing and good jobs. Obama tripled the money supply and the economy didn’t budge. That was by design. He essentially robbed us of our wealth.
If you want a vibrant screaming economy, good defenses and a safe place to live, get rid of liberal nanny-state government.
I’m one, too. The technology trap is waiting to be sprung. Already, some sense to tension in the springs and jaws. We are not alone.
Asimov coined the term 'positronic brain'. He said it sounded complex enough to defy immediate description and thus made it easier to believe....
bkmk for later
I am going to reduce down to 1 PC and one Cell phone. No intelligent i-phone whatever you call it. I have always gone against the grain, never follow the crowd, and I don’t want to be one of those fools with my face in a tiny 4x3 inch screen all the time. Life is to precious to me to waste staring at a screen outside the home unless I am being paid. I like to have a real life, not a virtual one.
Did it ever occur to people the slowdown is caused by people without jobs. We have been dumping american jobs in both high tech and manufacturing for years now. Now they are all scratching their damn heads trying to figure out why americans are not buying anything. They are not working or they are working for so much less that all they can afford are the basics.
All that capital sitting on the sidelines waiting to be plowed into healthcare.
Nothing sends businesses off shore faster than taxes about the only work left in the states are service jobs.
The reality is that the productivity gains brought about by the last 50+ years of computing adoption have reached a point of saturation. Computing power is now so cheap, applications used by the business sector are so ubiquitous that there are few to no more businesses left without the benefits of basic technology.
There are no huge productivity gains on the horizon from technology, and there haven’t been any disruptive technologies developed since the roll-out of the internet 10 years ago. Now the ‘net has just penetrated even the most remote corners of industry in the US, to the point where the ‘net is now in most anyone’s pocket (in their smartphone) in huge swathes of the CONUS area.
Even as recently as 15 years ago, running a small business’ books on computers was a significant investment of thousands of dollars. Today, you can buy a PC for a couple hundred bucks, Quickbooks for a little bit more, and wha-la, you’ve lept forward of paper accounting. There’s “website in a can” sites and tools out there to allow small businesses to set up e-commerce sites in a half day. What more is there that will provide a big leap forward in productivity? Not much. Facebook, Twitter, etc aren’t productivity boosting technologies. In fact, for most businesses, these social networking sites are huge time sinks.
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