It’s hard to make predictions…
...particularly about the future (Yogi Berra).
There’s an economist at Berkeley named Brad DeLong whose weblog I try to monitor. His site is here and I wanted to call attention to this essay, A framework for the economic analysis of technological revolutions, with an application to nanotechnology. I hadn’t been aware of the connection between the industrial revolution in England and the persistence of slavery in the U.S., and it also addressed something that worries me greatly—the increasing disparity in the U.S. along any dimension you can imagine (income, education, physical activity, etc.), which I see as being a fundamental threat to the future of our democracy and society.