Knowledge and Technology
The new technology embraces and feeds off the entire array of human knowledge’s.
The search for knowledge, as well as the teaching thereof, has traditionally been dissociated from application. Both have been organized by subject, that is, according to what appeared to be the logic of knowledge itself. The faculties and departments of the university, its degrees, its specializations, indeed the entire organization of higher learning, have been subject-focused. They have been, to use the language of the experts on organization, based upon “product,” rather than on “market” or “end use.” Now we are increasingly organizing knowledge and the search for it around areas of application rather than around the subject areas of disciplines. Interdisciplinary work has grown everywhere.
This is a symptom of the shift in the meaning of knowledge from an end in itself to a resource, that is, a means to some result. Knowledge as the central energy of a modern society exists altogether in application and when it is put to work. Work, however, cannot be defined in terms of the disciplines. End results are interdisciplinary of necessity.
ACTION POINT: List results for which you are responsible. What specialists are you dependent on to get these results? How can you improve coordination among these specialists?
Shrinking of the Younger Population
The next society will be with us shortly.
In the developed countries, the dominate factor in the society will be something to which most people are only just beginning to pay attention: the rapid growth of the older population and the rapid shrinking of the younger generation. The shrinking of the younger population will cause an even greater upheaval than the growing number of older people, if only because nothing like this has happened since the dying centuries of the Roman Empire. In every single developed country, but also in China and Brazil, the birth rate is now well below the replacement rate of 2.2 live births per woman of reproductive age. Politically, this means that immigration will become an important – and highly divisive – issue in all rich countries. It will cut across all traditional political alignments.
Economically, the decline in the younger population will change markets in fundamental ways. Growth in family formation has been the driving force of all domestic markets in the developed world, but the rate of family formation is certain to fall steadily unless bolstered by large-scale immigration of younger people.
ACTION POINT: Determine whether your organization is betting on young people, older people, or immigrants. Make sure you have a plan for the gradual decrease in the youth market and the increase in newcomers and the aged.
The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
Milton Friedman
Animals have come to mean so much in our lives. We live in a fragmented and disconnected culture. Politics are ugly, religion is struggling, technology is stressful, and the economy is unfortunate. What’s one thing that we have in our lives that we can depend on? A dog or a cat loving us unconditionally, every day, very faithfully.
Jon Katz
Our workforce and our entire economy are strongest when we embrace diversity to its fullest, and that means opening doors of opportunity to everyone and recognizing that the American Dream excludes no one.
Thomas Perez
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Ronald Reagan
Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it… gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman
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The reality is that business and investment spending are the true leading indicators of the economy and the stock market. If you want to know where the stock market is headed, forget about consumer spending and retail sales figures. Look to business spending, price inflation, interest rates, and productivity gains.
Mark Skousen
I have lived by one crucial principle since I was 24 years old. I don’t blame or complain about things like the economy, the government, taxes, employees, gas prices, or any of the external things that I don’t have control over. The only thing I have control over is my response to these things.
Jack Canfield
When people come to my act any time after Thanksgiving, I usually say, You shouldn’t be here. You should be shopping. Our economy depends on you! You should be out there buying stuff.’
Lewis Black
Illegal immigration is crisis for our country. It is an open door for drugs, criminals, and potential terrorists to enter our country. It is straining our economy, adding costs to our judicial, healthcare, and education systems.
Timothy Murphy
Even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality – an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order.
Friedrich August von Hayek
Nuclear power will help provide the electricity that our growing economy needs without increasing emissions. This is truly an environmentally responsible source of energy.
Michael Burgess
What’s hurting the U.S. economy is total government spending. The deficit is an indicator that the government is spending so much money that it can’t even get around to stealing all of the money that it wants to spend. But the tip of the iceberg is not what hit the Titanic – it was the 90 percent of the iceberg under water.
Grover Norquist
See, that’s why Barack’s running: to end the war in Iraq responsibly – to build an economy that lifts every family, to make sure health care is available for every American – and to make sure that every child in this nation has a world-class education all the way from preschool to college.
Michelle Obama
I tend to regard the Coase theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs.
Ronald Coase
What I am saying every day to Malawians is that time has come for us to move from aid to trade. We have picked several sectors that we think we can focus on immediately in order for us to grow our economy. So we have decided to diversify agriculture, we decided to develop our tourism sector, we have decided to develop our mining sector.
Joyce Banda
So I’m definitely in favour of stimulating the dynamic wealth creation sectors of the economy.
Boris Johnson
The way to turn our economy around is not by making rich people poorer, it’s by making poor people richer.
Marco Rubio
There is an incredible renewable energy resource off both coasts of this country – wind and tidal energy that can power our economy, create good paying jobs and reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
Chellie Pingree
I don’t know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we’ve been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about.
Alan Greenspan
You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out, because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we’ve elevated the economy above ecology.
David Suzuki
There are great challenges before you, from the overwhelming nature of climate change to the unfairness of an economy that excludes so many from our collective wealth, and the changes necessary to build a more inclusive and generous Canada. I believe in you.
Jack Layton