To: Rande Is who wrote (9519 ) 7/13/1999 11:50:00 AM From: Jon Stept Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 57584
Rande Is- "The Coming World Economic Boom..." Interesting post.... got me thinking about macro changes like the internet and what it means to economies. I think the inventions of ships and sailing led to an economic boom (if that is what it was called back then) since trading increased. It is very interesting that a lot of the cyber economy will take place outside of any location and will occur in realtime no matter where one is in the world. I would think that would put part of the coming expansion into hyper drive because a lot of the transactions that are used to measure economic growth are going to be completed instantaneously. Since a lot of the transactions are business related, this will tend to have a kind of feedback effect... since the transactions are so quick, the business growth will be very quick. The new trade routes are the internet, and there is pretty much no travel time for components that make up a large part of the economic picture- intellectual capital, information, software and money. It is hard to believe we may well be at the very beginning of such a boom, but when I think about the internet and compare it to other inventions and what they did to civilization, it does not seem so unlikely. It is hard to believe I have a mainframe computer on my desktop that cost a few hundred thousand dollars in the 1970's... when millions and millions of people, worldwide, have that kind of computing power and you throw free-markets into the mix... I am not at all surprised this is what we get... I think we are due for a the-world-is-not-flat or the-earth-is-not-the-center-of-the-universe kind of event. But it will be really, really hard to see because of the myopia. Just my opinion. Jon :)