Volume 1, Issue 2

This essay falls into three parts. The first reviews the Second Industrial Revolution based on the commercializing of electrical and steam power and lasted from the 1880s through the 1920s. The leaders here were concentrated along the Rhine Valley from Basel in Switzerland to the Low Countries. That technology permitted these pioneering enterprises to market their products worldwide. Because World War I cut the Rhine Valley off from most markets, high technology enterprises in the United States and much of Europe were forced to build their own research and development units. The Rhine Valley re-entered global markets in the 1920s and precipitated what Joseph Schumpeter has termed "The decade of creative destruction." The 1929 Wall Street crash and the coming of the 1930s' Great Depression marked the close of the Second Industrial Revolution.The second part is based on the new science of electronics and had its beginnings in the 1920s. The Radio Corporation of America commercialized new audio and video technologies. In the 1960s, RCA became a conglomerate and self-destructed allowing the Japanese firms Matsushita and Sony to capture markets world wide. In the 1950s, International Business Machines Company (IBM) commercialized four new electronic devices which led to the creation of Information Technology (IT) in the 1960s with the System 360 followed by the System 370 that dominated world markets. Then in the 1980s, largely by accident, four leading Japanese computer manufacturers successfully challenged the U.S. in the world market for computers.The third part rests on the fact that high technology industries continue to depend on the commercializing of scientific learning as had occurred in the field of chemistry in the 1960s. Chemical companies in the 1960s were forced to commercialize new products based only on existing technologies. Biology, on the other hand, was creating the wholly new disciplines of microbiology and enzymology and then new sciences arose with the discovery of the double helix. Molecular biology and its offshoots of biotechnology and genetic engineering are just beginning to evolve.I close with a review of four recent articles with a heading High Technology Ignored. Historical reality is reviewed here.

This lecture interprets the great tectonic shifts in the global economy that I have witnessed since I began studying economics in the 1950s. There are three stories of gaining ground (``catching up") on the world's lead economy and one of losing ground. This experience can help us to get right our international macroeconomics: Progress and prosperity in a country are mainly driven by envisaged openings for innovation or imitation of new things, not human capital formation or tax cuts. The experience also help us get right the political economy of economic performance: Dynamism is not required for episodes of high growth: Any economy can grow fast up to its potential and enjoy temporary prosperity in the effort. Yet it cannot pull up to the productivity level nor sustain the prosperity of the lead economy without having the latter's dynamism. Dynamism requires that innovation be ample, aimed in good directions and finding managers and consumers open to novelty. Some dissenters deny the premise, claiming that the Continent could not have its ``glorious years" of rapid growth and high activity without commensurate dynamism: the two are yoked together. They view that rapid growth in Germany, France and Italy as the fruit of economies that in the '40s got back their dynamism back when Ludwig Erhard unshackled them from the corporatist institutions erected in the interwar years and that lost their dynamism in the '70s when interest groups reacquired their stranglehold on economic change. I take a simpler view. The glorious years were the result not of a brief rebirth of dynamism but rather the fortunate result of one-time opportunities to pluck at low cost the technologies and commercial successes developed in the U.S. and elsewhere overseas. My view need not suppose that the Continent has had much dynamism at any time since corporatist ideas took root in the late 1920s – only enough to imitate or adapt overseas advances, plus long enough study of them. For the moment, such advances may be still be so new that such a modicum of dynamism is not yet sufficient to spark imitation.

From David Ricardo making a fortune buying British government bonds on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo to Warren Buffett selling insurance to the California earthquake authority, the wisest investors have earned extraordinary returns by investing in the unknown and the unknowable (UU). But they have done so on a reasoned, sensible basis. This essay explains some of the central principles that such investors employ. It starts by discussing ``ignorance," a widespread situation in the real world of investing, where even the possible states of the world are not known. Traditional finance theory does not apply in UU situations.Strategic thinking, deducing what other investors might know or not, and assessing whether they might be deterred from investing, for example due to fiduciary requirements, frequently point the way to profitability. Most big investment payouts come when money is combined with complementary skills, such as knowing how to develop real estate or new technologies. Those who lack these skills can look for ``sidecar" investments that allow them to put their money alongside that of people they know to be both capable and honest. The reader is asked to consider a number of such investments.Central concepts in decision analysis, game theory, and behavioral decision are deployed alongside real investment decisions to unearth successful investment strategies. These strategies are distilled into eight investment maxims. Learning to invest more wisely in a UU world may be the most promising way to significantly bolster your prosperity.