Joana, I was an early adopter of technology, but am questioning the ever increasing access to information and it's ability to improve business productivity. I actually think it's getting so overblown that it will cut into productivity and people are now tethered to the info highway by pagers, fax, email, computers, pda's, cell phones 24 hours a day. We are working more hours not less. How productive is this.
I think the expectation of massive productivity increases is overblown by investors. In my graphic design business customers now make endless revisions to documents, killing any productivity gains, because they can, much more cheaply and easily than 10-15 years ago - there are also an infinitely higher number of choices now - when i first started this business, customers usually chose from about 20 standard fonts, now 50,000 or more and 100-1000's of new ones created regularly..
anyway productivity enhancements necessarily mean that we will have enough buyers for the products, the tried and true business cycle has shown that at the peak of the business cycle consumers and corporates are loaded with debt and can no longer buy, it's kind of like when the market gets too bullish and everybody has bought and you need a correction for buyers to build up cash for another rally.
the business cycle works the same way and it's way overdue for a correction, martin armstrong has identified an 8.6 year cycle and the last time we had a recession was 10 years ago.
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