Without the fuel stations how would the auto take off the way it did? AOL, nope, broadband connection.
Don't you get it Sir?
You really need to read this book:
amazon.com
BTW
It's on tape as well.
amazon.com
Unlimited Wealth:
SNIP:
INTRODUCTION
For the past four hundred years, virtually all practitioners of the dismal science we call economics have agreed on one basic premise: namely that a society's wealth is determined by its supply of physical resources--its land, labor, minerals, water, and so on. And underlying this premise has been another, even more profound, assumption--one supposedly so obvious that it is rarely mentioned: namely, that the entire world contains a limited amount of these physical resources.
This means, from an economic point of view, that life is what the mathematicians call a zero-sum game. After all, if there are only limited resources, one person's gain must be another person's loss; the richer one person is, the poorer his neighbors must be.
Over the centuries, this view of the world has been responsible for innumerable wars, revolutions, political movements, government policies, business strategies, and possibly a religion or two.
Once upon a time, it may even have been true. But not anymore.
Whether or not we ever did, today we do not live in a resource-scarce environment. That may seem hard to believe, but the businessperson and the politician--as well as the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker--who continue to behave as if they were operating in the old zero-sum world will soon find themselves eclipsed by those who recognize the new realities and react accordingly.
What are these new realities? To put it simply, we live today in a world of effectively unlimited resources--a world of unlimited wealth. In short, we live in what one might call a new Alchemic world.
The ancient alchemists sought to discover the secret of turning base metals into gold; they tried to create great value where little existed before. But an analysis of their writings shows that they were on a spiritual as well as a monetary quest. They believed that by discovering how to make gold they could offer unlimited prosperity to all of God's children. And, although in our era the term alchemy is often equated with "false science" and fraud, the ancient alchemists were successful in their quest in a manner that they could not have anticipated.
Consider this: if the ancient alchemists had succeeded in fabricating gold, gold would have become worthless and their efforts would have been for naught. Yet, through their attempts to make gold, they laid the foundation for modern science, which today has accomplished exactly what the alchemists hoped to achieve: the ability to create great value where little existed before. We have achieved this ability through the most common, the most powerful, and the most consistently underestimated force in our lives today--technology.
In the alchemic world in which we now live, a society's wealth is still a function of its physical resources, as traditional economics has long maintained. But unlike the outdated economist, the alchemist of today recognizes that technology controls both the definition and the supply of physical resources. In fact, for the past few decades, it has been the backlog of unimplemented technological advances, rather than unused physical resources, that has been the determinant of real growth.
In the 1970s the world was supposedly running out of oil. Virtually every economist predicted that the end of an era was at hand. The industrial nations would have to tighten their belts, garage their cars, turn off their air conditioners, and generally adjust to lower standards of living. Today, oil prices (adjusted for inflation) are lower than they have been at any time since the 1960s. (Indeed, in terms of productivity--for example, how far a dollar's worth of gasoline will take you--prices are lower than they've ever been.)
What happened? What proved the economists wrong in their prediction? Through the magic of technology, we developed better methods of producing energy and more efficient ways of using it. By replacing $300 carburetors with $25 computerized fuel injectors, automobile manufacturers doubled the fuel efficiency of new cars. This effectively doubled the supply of gasoline, thus effectively increasing the supposedly fixed supply of oil. At the same time, we
also began developing entirely new energy sources, next to which the breakthroughs of the last decade will pale by comparison.
Our ability to transform the raw materials of nature into the most elegant and sophisticated devices imaginable--to "make computers from dirt," as the mathematician Mitchell Feigenbaum recently put it--has so dramatically altered the rules that we are playing an entirely new game.
The most successful entrepreneurs of our time--H. Ross Perot, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs--have been playing this new game without necessarily understanding its principles. Indeed, without knowing it, our best and brightest investment bankers, for example, have been proving the fundamental alchemic notion that resources are less important than technology; or, to put it in financial terms, that fixed physical assets are less important than intellectual assets. A decade ago, when T. Boone Pickens revolutionized the leveraged buy-out (LBO) business, the action was mainly in oil companies and other physical-resource-oriented firms. In 1989, by contrast, the biggest LBO in the U.S. was the Time-Warner deal, involving two companies whose assets are almost exclusively intangible and intellectual.
This book explains the new "game"--its origins, its nature, and its rules. It spells out just what these new realities mean to businesspeople and government policy-makers--what kind of business strategies and public policies make sense in the alchemic world and what kind are obsolete. It discusses what we, as consumers and citizens affected by it all, can and should do to become active participants in the game so as to enhance not only our own lives and the lives of our children but our society as well........
Get the book, it's well worth the money!!!! |
