Here’s what an astonishing graph (via Brookings) says. Job growth in America’s non-health-care economy has been dreadful during the last ten years. Just 2.1 percent total — or barely 0.2 percent per year. (Yes, that’s point-two percent annual growth.) In that time, the U.S. health care sector has grown more than ten-times faster than the rest of the economy, adding 2.6 million jobs.
Continue reading… “Growth of healthcare jobs in America: Graph”
Baxter is a robot meant to work with people in small manufacturing facilities.
Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.
David Brooks, in a recent column for the New York Times said that the U.S. has one clear advantage over Chinese competition: branding. He notes that U.S. firms are powered by “eccentric failed novelists” (presumably from agencies and consulting firms that are gifted at brand positioning and execution) and “visionary founders” (think Steve Jobs) who have created exceptional brands.
The most important reason why we rank so poorly is the increase in single mothers who face an extraordinary burden relative to their overseas counterparts.
If you listen to the leaders in the United States this is the greatest country in the history of everything. But, if you read international surveys the U.S. is a disgrace among developed countries. The health care system is famously expensive and inaccessible. The education system is broken. And the income inequality, it’s just famous.
Continue reading… “How did the work-life balance get so awful in America?”
The rich got richer, and the poor kept on getting poorer.
In 2010, Zero Hedge started an annual series looking at the (re)distribution in the wealth of nations and social classes. What they found then (and what the media keeps rediscovering year after year to its great surprise) is that as a result of global central bank policy, the rich got richer, and the poor kept on getting poorer, even though as they predicted the global political powers would, at least superficially, seek to enforce policies that aimed to reverse this wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich (a doomed policy as the world’s legislative powers are largely in the lobby pocket of the world’s wealthiest who needless to say are less then willing to enact laws that reduce their wealth and leverage).
Continue reading… “The 0.6% world: Who owns what of the $223 trillion in gobal wealth”
Android is everywhere.
The work space of Ken Oyadomari at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., looks like a triage tent for smartphones. Dozens of disassembled devices parts are strewn on workbenches. A small team of young engineers picks through the electronic carnage, carefully extracting playing card-size motherboards—the microprocessing heart of most computers—that will be repurposed as the brains of spacecraft no bigger than a softball. Satellites usually cost millions of dollars to build and launch. The price of Oyadomari’s nanosats, as they’ve become known, is around $15,000 and dropping. He expects them to be affordable for high school science classes, individual hobbyists, or anyone who wants to perform science experiments in space.
Continue reading… “Android is becoming the operating system for the Internet of Things”
Futurist Thomas Frey: What does it mean to “own” something?
I’m sure there are legal definitions, but most of us believe that once we purchase an item, we own it. Our relationship with that object shifts from ogler to owner in the blink of a cash register transaction.
iTunes
Asymco analyst Horace Dediu has a very smart point regarding the real impact of shifting media consumption patterns on legacy gatekeepers.He estimates that iTunes’ average revenue per user (ARPU) has fallen from over $100 in the fourth quarter of 2007 to about $39 by the fourth quarter of 2012. Over that same time, the number of total iTunes accounts has roughly doubled, from around 250 million to roughly 500 million.
The technology-enabled business trends will not only be a boon for consumers but also stimulate growth.
McKinsey & Company described ten information technology three years ago that enabled business trends that were profoundly altering the business landscape. Since then, the pace of technology change, innovation, and business adoption has been stunning. Consider that the world’s stock of data is now doubling every 20 months; the number of Internet-connected devices has reached 12 billion; and payments by mobile phone are hurtling toward the $1 trillion mark.
Continue reading… “10 tech-enabled business trends for the decade ahead”
Where will the jobs be, and how can companies carve out a competitive advantage in the global economy?
Exactly what technologies and trends will change our lives are hard to predict. Few people understood just how powerful the Internet would be, dismantling entire industries and creating millions of jobs.
Continue reading… “Top 12 disruptive technologies that are transforming the world”
Coding is just a fundamental tool, the same way writing in English and algebra are.
There’s a good chance that your kid’s classroom will be remodeled by the tech industry. After years of more or less resisting the pull of the web, both college and K-12 seem ripe to be remade for the digital age. There’s political buy-in. There’s investor buy-in. There’s a pervasive sense that it’s just time.
Futurist Thomas Frey: As a futurist I spend much of my time tracking failure. Why failure? Because they are the unforgiving anchors around which society changes directions.
Continue reading… “The Urgency of Purpose and the Forward Movement of Failure”