I took EcoHist when others were getting their MBAs to get rich. Of all my MBA friends, only one really made his millions. Another made and lost it due to greed during the boom.
I considered Economics to be a more valuable degree because it required greater amounts of tangential knowledge and study. Psychology, sociology, business, politics, math, etc., all play a role.
I didn't expect to get rich with it, but to try to understand why things happen, which is the basis of any science. Nobody really respects economists because they don't believe the economy is predictable. It isn't. But the goal of science isn't to predict, it's to explain. It is happenstance that many things in the "hard" sciences occur again and again.
In fact, many things in economics occur again and again. Usually for different reasons than the first time, though.
As for the previous tech booms, one of the most important things to remember is that we never had an "industrial" revolution, but we've been in the midst of an information revolution since Gutenberg. Industry, and the vast improvements we saw in the 1800's were really more a result of the spread of information than of improved design. Improved design, as important as it was/is, was directly related to improved information flows. Most technology that was developed in the 1800's represented better transmission of information within systems than anything else.
That said, we are still trying to get our arms around all this information. We haven't tamed it yet. We probably never will. Which is precisely why technology is such a great growth industry as we continue to move forward. |
