Post-industrial society industrial age government

[william the wie]

Just reading some of the threads and realized that this was an issue that wasn't being addressed but was causing a lot of problems for example in the Amazon vs. Texas thread. Leaving aside for the moment that Texas is sucking up to Google droid (Apple and its allies do not do as much business in Texas as the PC giants.) the problem is the structure of the government vs. the structure of the economy.

Since our current (third to eighth regime depending on how the English civil war and Glorius revolution are counted) was set up 13 years after the start of the industrial revolution it is an industrial age government that has become increasingly ineffectual over the past forty years. So the question I want to ask is whether it will become more effective fast enough to endure in something resembling current form or will technology drive it onto the rocks?

My position is that 30 years from now there will be a USA recognizably descended from the current one with similar or the same borders. Changes in foreign, economic and entitlement policies between now and then may and I expect will be less recognizable:

Alliances with the depopulating mostly developed northern hemisphere will make much less sense as time goes on and US garrisons will be moved.

As more trade moves to the internet more middlemen will be removed from supply and distribution chains.

Entitlement policies will change in unknown ways.

The balance between the states and DC will change.

So what changes do you expect?

 

[psikeyhackr]

So the question I want to ask is whether it will become more effective fast enough to endure in something resembling current form or will technology drive it onto the rocks?

The US has failed to cope with the second industrial revolution and what could be done with technology since WWI.

Freudian psychology has been used to manipulate Americans with advertising since then. Television began making it a factor in politics since the 50s.



John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out the problem in 1959. He wrote The Affluent Society and Vance Packard wrote The Waste Makers. So the government has been progressively failing for 50 years. Now we have another layer of technology on top of what they failed to cope with already.

The economists haven't been telling the government and everyone else what consumers have been losing on the depreciation of garbage that has been manufactured for decades. Now how do they explain doing bad algebra for the entire planet for 50 years?

PBS Discussions :: View topic - The Algebra of Economics

psik

 

[william the wie]

It ain't pretty any way you look at it.