Reclaiming the Revolution

There is an old saying that necessity is the mother of invention.

Joseph Schumpeter was the economist who really saw that it was innovation that drives our world.

That was not even the experience prior to the Great Depression which caught the tail end of the second industrial revolution or with the impact of the microcomputer in the third industrial revolution which meant steady change over many years.

It connects the idea of disruption with a popular concept associated with a twentieth-century economist called Joseph Schumpeter, and that concept is creative destruction.

The great value of the capitalism to have emerged from industrialisation is not the profits derived from efficiently allocating the world’s resources in some linear fashion. It is a much more dynamic network – spread across cities, countries and the world – which facilitates creativity, innovation and addressing the problems of society.

are then in a world where those high human skills are in great demand: creativity, innovation, collaboration, adaptability, cultural intelligence and leadership.

real dilemma that new technology presents: robots enable economic growth but they exacerbate income inequality.

the tail end

But it did not. Cleveland became part of what is known as the American Rust Belt. By the 1970s industrial towns and cities in the West declined. Deindustrialisation set in as manufacturing waned and factories were abandoned. Advanced economies, led by the United States, built on the information technologies emerging and evolving, and created service sectors with finance at its heart. Eventually this would power growth, so that by the mid-1990s an economic transformation had taken place. But this was little comfort to those who had relied on old-fashioned work in manufacturing and steel production.

But it could just be that these early experiments in offering a basic income, in New Zealand, the Netherlands as well as Finland and now even Wales,