From Wladawsky-Berger’s blog entry on Carlota Perez’s analysis in 2005:
She mentions three particular structural tensions that we need still to work out in order to move on: investments continue to be focused on short-term gain, not on long-term production and growth; the social system continues to foster an unstable environment in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; and there is too much idle money chasing and inflating assets like housing and not going into expanding the demand needed to soak up all the excess supply being produced.â€
And from the Wall Street Journal in April 2009:
The Mushahar in Bihar are part of a political and economic shift that is building across the Indian countryside. The transformation, largely driven by development spending by national and state policy makers, will be put to a test starting next week. The world’s largest democracy kicks off a month of polling April 16 in which many of the leaders behind these experiments are seeking re-election.
Growth has slowed in the new India of technology outsourcing, property development and securities trade. But old India — the rural sector that is home to 700 million of the country’s billion-plus people — shows signs it can pick up the slack. The rural awakening helps explain why India continues to grow even as the U.S. recession drags on the world economy.
The very idea of the “elevator pitch” encodes a complex economic theory in which investment ideas are supposed to be reducible to 1minute sound bites that professional money managers have the judgment and expertise to screen. To me, one of the problems in the US economic system is that too much power is concentrated in the hands of professional money managers – from bankers to venture capitalists to investment advisors. For 30 years or more, we in the US have been force fed a theory that the government doesn’t have the expertise to pick winners and losers compared to the nimble and efficient market. And certainly, it is clear that the government can blow lots of money on nonsense. But compare the Internet, developed by a government monopoly and by DARPA and then NSF, to Pets.com or, worse, Countrywide, and ask which was a better considered, smarter investment.