Page 26 - Tech Revolution News Today

Disruption given the delays of the 5g rollout near certain airports? so many airlines had to make a decision yesterday. theyre long haul flights. they had to let staff and passengers know what was going on. also the nature of yesterday, we saw such chaotic mixed messages. you had the airlines saying they were facing catastrophic disruption, calling for a delay. you had mobile operators saying it was safe, but the faa had had long enough. they delayed this decision before. they didnt want to dela...

Right — now, everything youre outlining about the missions that face us today and what must be done in terms of a response by government and the private sector working together to meet them, i get it all, but youre an economist, and you do seem to be abandoning some, what i would have regarded as fairly fundamental economic principles. you seem to be saying, "it doesnt matter how much money the state throws at these problems, it should just throw everything at these problems." what matters, yo...

And that dont actually have a design of economic policy that is purpose—oriented, that ends up with these huge problems like we had with argentinean inflation. but also, in south africa, for example, where im also advising the government right now, they have a problem where its the economic structure. so, for example, when you have a large, state—owned enterprise like eskom, what should the relationship be between the state and this public actor? because its notjust about public, private. in...

What matters, you say, is the outcome, not how you get there. and if you — im paraphrasing — but if you build up mountains of sovereign debt, that doesnt seem to concern you. so first of all, it does concern me, and its precisely because it does that i wrote the book. because the problem is, if the state sees its role as just fixing market failures and every now and then, during the pandemic or during a war, just throws a lot of money into the system, right, without actually structuring the ...

By the fortune 500 companies just in buying back their shares to boost stock prices, stock options, and executive pay. so that financialization of the private sector and a public sector that is often too bureaucratic, inertial, not flexible and agile, theyre both, you know, equally... problematic. ..important problems. huge problems. we have just seen a minister in the uk resign because... we talked covid, in the covid response, he says billions of pounds was wasted because the government couldn...

Financejust ended up back in the financial sector. so it was undirected. the same response after the initial panic over covid, the federal reserve poured money into the us economy. exactly, so the point is, we have to stop just pouring money in last—minute when we have huge problems. we need to be thinking, in this mission—oriented way, where public money, taxpayer money, is going after big problems, working alongside the private sector, and in so doing, expanding our productive capacity. bu...

Of fraudulent claims made by businesses seeking relief. and money was given away. yeah, and the best quote — or i like this quote because it really goes to the centre of the problem — lord agnew, a tory lord, in the middle of the pandemic, i think it was a year ago, said that the uk state, the british state, was weak. why? because it had become infantilized due to all this over—outsourcing that its done to, for example, consulting companies, to the big four, but also to the circas and the ...

Look at the billions pfizer is making off the back of a vaccine, where, in that case, as well, there was not only public money, but it shouldnt be the goal during a pandemicjust to make a lot of profits from the vaccine. it should, at least, because its a pandemic, its a global pandemic, we must have a mission and work together to, as i mentioned before, vaccinate everybody. and if we dont have the local capacity in africa also to deliver the vaccine once we have it, we need to backtrack and ask...

When you look at recent history, you pick the elements which work best for your argument. you take the tech revolution, inspired by, you, say, money as an investment made by big government, specifically the us department of defence in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to the invention of the internet. but you can read the tech revolution in different ways. there are other ways of reading it which say yes, again, the initial impulse, the state was important, but the way its played out is absolutely ...

Of bailouts and recovery funds and loans and so on, subsidies, guarantees, to different sectors to do what nasa did, which was to carefully design its public—private partnerships with multiple businesses. you are, sort of ideologically, a progressive who believes that for years, perhaps, as a result of the legacies of ronald reagan, margaret thatcher and others, the power, the positive, proactive power of the state has been underplayed. when you look at recent history, you pick the elements wh...