Globalization Goes High-Tech: A Worrisome World of Abundance

Abstract

I was visiting the carefully preserved medieval ruins underlying Turku, Finland, recently, and the remains of these small stone and wood homes forcibly reminded me of the harsh way people lived just 200 hundred years ago. Before the Industrial Revolution gave us the comfortable lives we enjoy today, the average European lived in a large hut of some type, often with dirt floors and no windows. Indoor plumbing? Electricity? Medical care? Refrigeration? All yet to be invented. Economics was originally defined at about that time as managing limited resources that decrease when shared in a world of scarcity. Little wonder it was called “the dismal science.”