Can Technology Save the Economy?

Part 1 of 2

The U.S. stimulus bill includes tens of billions to support energy and information technologies. It is intended both to create jobs immediately and to set the stage for long-term economic growth. So why are economists and innovation experts so skeptical?

By any measure, $100 billion is a staggering amount of money. That’s how much the federal stimulus bill devotes to the discovery, development, and implementation of various technologies. Some $20 billion will fund the increased use of electronic medical records; another $7.2 billion will support the extension of broadband Internet access to areas currently without such services. Most impressive, roughly $60 billion will be spent on energy, funding everything from energy-efficiency programs to loan guarantees for the construction of large facilities that use new biofuel and solar technologies.

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The Economy Needs Ayn Rand : The Debate

Author Ayn Rand’s philosophy of rational self-interest is more relevant today—amid the flurry of government bailouts—than ever. Pro or con?

Join the BusinessWeek Debate Room >>

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Ant algorithms

A review of E.O. Wilson’s latest in The NY Review of Books. Ants seem to get a lot done based on a few simple capabilities: they can lay down odors, detect and differentiate those odors, and count.

In Surely You’re Joking, Feynman recounts some great experiments he did on ants in his Princeton dorm room. See, e.g., here. My wife is totally uninterested when I do these types of things at home, but perhaps my kids will like it when they get a bit older

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Cloud Computing: Its Evolution Depends on Economics

The 20th century saw an incredible shift in access power, from literacy and the newspaper to radio and the telephone, from television and the satellite dish to the personal computer and the network.

Newspapers were originally fed on presses manually one sheet at a time. Telephones were once connected via legions of operators connecting callers (one at a time) with cables and plugs; and today computer networks are still managed by legions of manual administrators who configure network appliances and manage IP addresses as endpoints are added or moved or networks are acquired. Yet can cloud computing really take that pain away?

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