Long Boom or Short Blip?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.07/longboom_pr.html

Wired Magazine: The Long Boom.

Dangerous to make a claim like this depending on where you were at -- I doubt many Rwandans are nostalgic for 1994, or anyone in Yugoslavia for most of the whole decade.

But speaking from a well-off-enough American context, sure was nice to not have the Cold War around.

Apparently just before a stock crash people start going on about how technology or something has led to a new paradigm of permanent economic expansion and rising stock prices.

'Will a rise in terrorism cause the world to pull back in constant fear?'

and

'The Middle East, meanwhile, enters crisis. Two main factors drive the region's problems. One, the fundamentalist Muslim mind-set is particularly unsuited to the fluid demands of the digital age. The new economy rewards experimentation, constant innovation, and challenging the status quo - these attributes, however, are shunned in many countries throughout the Middle East. Many actually get more traditional in response to the furious pace of change. The other factor driving the crisis is outside their control. The advent of hydrogen power clearly undermines the centrality of oil in the world economy. By 2008, with the auto industry in a mad dash to convert, the bottom falls out of the oil market. The Middle Eastern crisis comes to a head. Some of the old monarchies and religious regimes begin to topple.'

...or were they pushed?

Nice to see lots of jobs as spies, baggage checkers, Arabic translators etc, bucking the trend.

For example, the Florida land boom of the mid-1920s was based on the idea that wealthy New Yorkers and other northerners would use Florida as a vacation spot and retirement paradise, completely transforming the state's economy. That idea was totally OTM.

What happened was that this totally sound idea was planted in the minds of hundreds of thousands of investors who began to bid up prices on prime land in a short period of time. As the same pieces of land changed hands several times, each time for a more-inflated price, the speculation began to take on a life of its own. It looked like all you had to do to make a fortune overnight was to "buy some land in Florida" and sell it again a few months later. After all, thousands upon thousands of people had done so, and that proved it.

As a result, a lot of hapless suckers bought a lot of swampland for a lot of money. Some of them even hit it rich by buying and selling totally worthless land. Some of the lucky ones were utterly clueless, too. In a bubble, you don't have to have a clue to make money. Or to lose it. Easy money is so addictive that few investors will get out of a bubble market, including the 'smart' ones. But the bottom has to drop out some time.

When that happens, if the bubble was big enough, the whole economy suffers. See the Great Depression. The problem is that bubbles inspire tons of misinvestment and outright fraud. If a society spends enough of its resources on useless, unwise or unnecessary junk, then a lot of it will have to be abandoned later on. It can be almost as destructive as a war.

The nineties were great. I was rich, and had a lustrous head of non-graying hair.

I think there's a kind of beauty in the peak of the FTSE (and Dow Jones I think) being on the 31st Dec 1999. Actually, it might have been the 30th, but still.

decrease in dna sequencing cost
increase in human genes mapped per year
increase in genomes sequenced per year
increase in ram
increase of magnetic data storage capacities
decrease in isp cost for higher performance
decrease in modem cost for higher performance
increase in internet backbone bandwidth
increase in fastest possible data transmission speed
increase in the growth of the internet
decrease in the price for higher performance of wireless devices
decrease in transistor size
decrease in costs of brain scan
decrease in size of computers
decrease of the size of mechanical devices
increase in parecon-like businesses (ok, this one is a fake)
increase in u.s. patents granted
increase in u.s. education expenditures
increase in human life expectancy

there is no bubble bust there.
such an abundance of richness can't but help to decrease disease and poverty around the world isn'it?

On the state of "inclusive and ethical global trade" it looks like the friggin libertarians are otm for all I know.

to end the environmental problems we don't need less technology we need smarter technology.

Right now is where it's at and looking at exponential growth trends, it is a safe bet to say that tomorrow is going to be even better. (note to self: don't make it an excuse to slack off).