Yussef Robinson and Herman Mark Schwartz in American Affairs:
That we stand in the midst of a geoeconomic and geopolitical inflection point is increasingly clear, but as Walter Benjamin said, the angel of history always looks backwards. Not being angels, we lean on our asset management expertise to take the riskier path of looking forward and sketching some possible scenarios for the post-inflection future. Doing so requires outlining growth waves in capitalist economies, first generally, and then specifically for the information and communications technology (ICT) plus biotech 1.0 growth wave to understand how an internal process of decay exhausted that wave, creating the forces generating the current inflection point. This clears the way to look at a potential new package of general-purpose technologies, why those technologies and organizational formats look like solutions to current problems, and how they might get married to emerging forms of corporate and social organization. We end with three scenarios for the future. Place your bets.
Joseph Schumpeter famously argued (and contemporary neo-Schumpeterians like Carlota Perez maintain) that orthodox economics gets things wrong by focusing on equilibrium models (as in the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models most macroeconomics deploys) and on exchange rather than on production. Instead, Schumpeterians view capitalism as a dynamic process that never attains equilibrium. Moreover, revolutions in productive technologies that create eras of relatively fast growth and then stagnation characterize capitalism more so than equilibrium. These technologies emerge as a package of investment-driven changes to how things are made, moved, and marketed.
More here.
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