Almost exactly four years after V-J Day—on August 13, 1949, to be precise—an MIT professor named Norbert Wiener wrote a letter to Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW). It contained a darkly prophetic message: within a decade or two, Wiener wrote, the advent of automatic automobile assembly lines would result in “disastrous” unemployment. The power of computers to control machines made such an outcome all but inevitable. As a creator of this new technology, Wiener wanted to give Reuther advance notice so that the UAW could help its members prepare for, and adapt to, the massive displacement of labor that Wiener saw on the horizon.

Now if anyone in 1949 grasped the disruptive potential of computing machines, it was Norbert Wiener. What Albert Einstein was to the nuclear age, Norbert Wiener was to the information age. Home-schooled until age nine by his demanding immigrant father, Wiener made headlines as the “Youngest College Man in the History of the United States” when he enrolled at Tufts University in 1906 at age eleven. In 1913, at only eighteen, he earned his PhD from Harvard in mathematical philosophy. By the time Wiener wrote to Reuther, he had grown round and renowned. (“Short, rotund, and myopic, combining these and many qualities in extreme degree” was one contemporary’s description.) He had contributed to the development of the first modern computer, created the first automated machine, and laid the groundwork for a new transdisciplinary science of information and communication that he termed “cybernetics.” His work would anticipate and inspire Marshall McLuhan’s heralded studies of mass media, would provide the initial impetus for the explorations by James Watson and Francis Crick that led to the discovery of the double helix, and would spur science-fiction writer William Gibson to coin the term “cyberspace” in describing a type of virtual world that Wiener himself had envisioned two decades before the creation of the first web page.

As Wiener warned Reuther of the potentially dire consequences of automated production, he also had a plan to avoid calamity. The UAW, he advised, should “steal a march upon the existing industrial corporations” by taking ownership of the technology for robotics, and then using the returns from the production of robots to fund “an organization dedicated to the benefit of labor.” He admitted the existence of another option: the UAW could undertake to keep the new technology from entering into industrial use. But having suggested this option, he immediately dismissed it: since ideas forming the basis for robotics were already “very much in the air,” they likely could not be suppressed.

Surprisingly, Reuther, the Big Labor kingpin, did not dismiss the portly professor’s Cassandra calls. To the contrary, Reuther responded to Wiener promptly by telegram. “Deeply interested in your letter,” he wrote. “Would like to discuss it with you at earliest opportunity following conclusion of our current negotiations with Ford Motor Company. Will you be able to come to Detroit?” For some months thereafter these two global figures sought to coordinate their schedules. When they met at last in March 1950, they pledged to work together to create a labor-science council to anticipate, and prepare for, major technological changes affecting workers. But then their paths diverged. The idea never came to fruition.

In the spring of 2011, my George Mason University colleague Tyler Cowen published a widely read treatise titled The Great Stagnation arguing that the good ideas, that is to say, the best ideas, for moving human societies forward have already been discovered and put into practice. While the economic crisis, fiscal irresponsibility, and other transient factors may have contributed to the “Great Recession” in the United States, Cowen argues that the roots of America’s economic slowdown are deeper: we have picked the “low-hanging fruit” of technological progress, and as a consequence, further economic advance will be slower and less dramatic than it was the past. If prosperity feeds at the banquet table of knowledge, then we’re down to the leftovers. In Cowen’s words,

The American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies. Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.

Cowen substantiates his claim with a carefully constructed fact-based argument, but his strongest points are still the intuitive ones. Think of a person born in the United States in 1891 or thereabouts (my paternal grandmother, for example) who looked out at the world on her sixtieth birthday, in 1951. The reality before her would have been almost wholly unimaginable at the time of her birth. Electric lights, the telephone, automobiles and airplanes, even flush toilets. All of these would have been either extremely rare or nonexistent in her childhood. But what of someone born in 1951 looking at the world today? Sure, we have cell phones and Facebook. The tools of medicine are quite a bit fancier. But, fundamentally, the architecture of modern life has not changed much. A US household today is only incrementally different from a US household sixty years ago. That, essentially, is the core point of The Great Stagnation.

Cowen goes on to note that most of the technologies that have defined the modern world—those that would have seemed marvelous to my grandmother on her sixtieth birthday—were first introduced at the end of the nineteenth century. Their impact on the economy peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. It was these technologies that drove the growth in both industry and government during the Industrial Age—the age of economies of scale that I described in chapter 1. The story of the social and economic changes wrought by these new technologies is, as I have argued, the economic subtext of the twentieth century. Cowen is not alone in making this argument. Venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel similarly received considerable attention for a fall 2011 piece in The National Review titled “The End of the Future.” New York Times economics correspondent David Leonhardt echoed the themes in The Great Stagnation in an essay titled “The Depression: If Only Things Were That Good” that pointed to a surprising contrast between short-term and long-term trends at the time of the Great Depression:

Underneath the misery of the Great Depression, the United States economy was quietly making enormous strides during the 1930s. Television and nylon stockings were invented. Refrigerators and washing machines turned into mass-market products. Railroads became faster and roads smoother and wider. As the economic historian Alexander J. Field has said, the 1930s constituted “the most technologically progressive decade of the century.” Economists often distinguish between cyclical trends and secular trends—which is to say, between short-term fluctuations and longterm changes in the basic structure of the economy. No decade points to the difference quite like the 1930s: cyclically, the worst decade of the 20th century, and yet, secularly, one of the best.

All is well so far. But, haven’t similar predictions of impending technological stagnation been made—and proved wrong—before? Yes, on a fairly regular basis. In fact, the last flurry of techno-pessimistic outpouring was in the in the 1920s and 1930s—exactly the time when, as Cowen and Leonhardt both accurately report, the great inventions responsible for past prosperity were peaking in terms of their aggregate impact. In chapter 1, I quoted John Maynard Keynes, who stated in 1929 that “it is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterized the nineteenth century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of living is now going to slow down.” Similarly, here is Joseph Schumpeter himself, in a chapter from Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy titled “The Vanishing of Investment Opportunity,” paraphrasing the view of his own techno-pessimistic contemporaries:

Most of my fellow economists [ feel that] we have been witnessing not merely a depression and a bad recovery, accentuated perhaps by anti-capitalist policies, but the symptoms of a permanent loss of vitality which must be expected to go on and to supply the dominating theme for the remaining movements of the capitalist symphony; hence no inference as to the future can be drawn from the functioning of the capitalist engine and of its performance in the past.

This is about as succinct a summary as is possible of the arguments recently advanced by Cowen, Thiel, and Leonhardt.

Of course, the mere fact that arguments similar to those in The Great Stagnation have been advanced, and proven incorrect, in the past does not prove that contemporary versions are without merit. As I expect is evident both from my summary of Cowen’s argument and my decision to feature it here, I am largely in agreement with at least one dimension of the core point he is making: that both scientific invention and market-based innovation are, in some sense, getting more difficult as time goes by.

Some years ago I organized a panel at a meeting held at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City (where I am currently affiliated) that focused on the relationship between technological complexity and the long-term future of innovation. Among the panelists who consented to participate was Ben Jones, a brilliant young economist recently graduated from the doctoral program at MIT. At the meeting, Jones summarized findings from two of his papers, “The Burden of Knowledge and the ‘Death of the Renaissance Man’: Is Innovation Getting Harder?” and “Age and Great Invention.” These papers intrigued me because they offered a painstakingly argued validation of a conjecture I had been forming in my own mind at the time—that increases in the complexity of technology compelled scientists to specialize ever more narrowly in order to make significant advances, but at the same time they increased the returns to the difficult task of bridging disciplines to create fundamentally new economic combinations.

Jones found that the average age at which great inventors arrived at their breakthroughs was about six years later for inventors working at the end of the twentieth century than for those working at the beginning of the twentieth century. This finding supports the notion that the “lowhanging fruit” of scientific discovery has been harvested by earlier generations; as a consequence, for any given scientist, future advance will be increasingly challenging. Young scientists can compensate for this increasing “knowledge burden,” as Jones terms it, by specializing ever more narrowly within a disciplinary area of study. But, such specialization comes at a well-known cost: an intellectual narrowing that, in the limit, results in knowing everything about nothing and nothing about everything. It is due to precisely this dynamic that the phrase “it’s academic” has sadly come to be synonymous with “it’s irrelevant.”

Yet, despite evident costs to society as a whole, such long-term trends cannot be easily shifted, much less reversed. The reality today remains much as Jones found it to be a decade ago: without increased specialization, scientific discovery slows or ceases; without teamwork and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, technological innovation slows or ceases. If technological complexity increases more rapidly than the average human life span, these two observations combine to suggest a sort of fundamental limit on the human potential to generate technological advance.

Will it someday be impossible to live long enough to acquire the knowledge needed to make advances on prior knowledge? Will new learning come to an end?

No. An end to technological evolution is no more likely than an end to biological evolution. The underlying reason is the same in both cases: the nearly unbounded power of combinatorial possibilities—the topic that was the focus of chapter 7.

If the current generations of techno-pessimists fail to see the creation of new combinations at work today, it’s simply because they either can’t glimpse them from where they sit, or they’re just not looking hard enough. Granted, the technologies that drove past prosperity in the United States—electric lights, the telephone, automobiles and airplanes, flush toilets—are today improving only incrementally in comparison with the past. But those very same technologies are only now reaching the majority of the world’s population. The resultant productivity gains are massive and reverberating in an epic fashion on a global scale. That process is just beginning.

What’s more, the infrastructure technologies that will define the nature of both business and government in the coming century are just now coming into use. Where twentieth-century technologies reshaped the world around economies of scale, twenty-first century technologies will shape the world once again, this time around economies of collaboration. For a new generation of innovators, overcoming complexity is the paramount challenge. As Martin Weitzman has astutely observed, “The ultimate limits to growth may lie not as much in our ability to generate new ideas, so much as in our ability to process an abundance of potentially new seed ideas into usable forms.” Contemporary tools are, unsurprisingly, particularly well suited to contemporary challenges: assessing the effectiveness of new combinations, rather than generating new building blocks.

As to whether that process—sorting the good ideas from the bad in a complex world—will itself ultimately get so difficult that human progress will terminate altogether in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth centuries, well, from a present-day standpoint, it’s academic.

As the editor of the journal Innovations, I’m asked with some regularity, “So, what is innovation anyhow? How would you…”? (eyebrows usually furrow here) “… define it?” Since I don’t particularly enjoy debating definitions, I usually respond by saying: “That’s a difficult question. But one thing is for sure: If you’re not pissing someone off, it’s probably not innovation.”

I like this response because, if it doesn’t end the conversation, it usually shifts it from definitions to dynamics — which is what innovation is all about, after all. But I also like it because it captures one fundamental obstacle to innovation that all would-be disruptors must be prepared to face: the potentially hostile response of incumbents who don’t want to see their market advantages threatened.

How to handle the hostile response from incumbents when it comes? Don’t just create a product. Create a movement.

(… and if you want to know what this all has to do with the Pillsbury Doughboy, you’ll have to read the post…)

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike / They’ve all gone to look for America.

It also turned out to be a great focal point of conversation. Why is a song about hitchhiking and bus-travel titled “America”? …

I was thinking about that experience as I listened to radio reports today about the case being heard by the Supreme Court concerning Arizona’s “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” or SB 1070. Now, before you get the wrong impression, this post isn’t going to be about the merits of that case. I’m not a lawyer so I don’t have much to say about the merits of cases that arrive before the Supreme Court. So it’s also not about whether people who are stopped for a traffic violation should be detained until they can prove their right to be in the United States. It is also not about the extent to which State and local police should be enforcing Federal immigration laws.

As an economist, I do feel fairly comfortable discussing the role of immigration in America’s economic success. While the past contributions of immigrants and immigration are fairly well understood, in The Coming Prosperity I focus on the future. I talk about how the newest Americans are uniquely valuable to this country because of the strong connections they collectively have to every other town and city in the world–the places where global growth will be coming from in the decades ahead. This is a form of capital–relational capital–potentially more valuable than any other in the 21st century. For this reason, we should value immigrants as our collaborative advantage.

My colleague at George Mason University, Tyler Cowen, puts it this way: “What are we afraid of from having more talented people in this country.” While high-skilled immigrants contribute in some very obvious ways to the growth and development of the US economy, low-skilled immigrants contribute as well. “I think this should be a country of 400 million people,” Cowen says. “And we should get there fairly soon.” From an economic standpoint, I agree. We in the United States would be much better off. (The rest of the world would be as well, as this paper by Michael Clemens points out quite dramatically and conclusively.)

The Arizona Law is economically misguided–of that there is little doubt. It’s also mistimed, since it takes a hard stand against a problem–illegal immigration across the Mexican-US border–that is evaporating before our eyes for reasons having nothing to do with the Arizona State legislature. (Google “demographic transition” and “Mexico” for one reason; check the trends on the documented number of illegal crossings for another.)

But it’s as a citizen that I’m most troubled by SB 1070. I believe that any human society goes down the wrong road when it stops respecting the universal aspiration for freedom, connection to other people, and true prosperity—an aspiration to which the process of migration is deeply connected.  In that sense I believe that the spirit of SB 1070, the intent of the law, runs counter to what I see as the core values of the United States.

There is nothing more American than mobility. Social mobility. Physical mobility. Aspirations and their realization. Freedom.

And why are immigrants here after all? They’ve all come to look for America.

That’s what the rest of us are doing too.

The optimism that permeates Mr. Vaitheeswaran’s book is also a defining feature of The Coming Prosperity by Philip Auerswald. Never before, he maintains, have more people had more opportunity to create value for society. Driving that value creation are the world’s entrepreneurs.

The Coming Prosperity is filled with vivid profiles of men and women who have succeeded under harsh conditions. (His subjects are not the usual ones—no gush about Steve Jobs here.) One example is Karim Khoja, who founded the first private-sector cellular telephone company in Afghanistan, in 2003. Today that company, Roshan, serves more than five million subscribers and is the country’s single largest taxpayer, generating about 5% of all government revenue.

Elsewhere, Mr. Auerswald describes how Ibrahim Abouleish, the founder of the Sekem Group, managed to thwart government officials, secure financing and pursue his dream of making a “garden in the desert of Egypt” by means of high-yield organic agriculture. And then there is Victoria Hale, a former pharmaceutical-company executive who, after a kind of epiphany, started OneWorld Health, a nonprofit devoted to “matching orphan drugs to neglected diseases.” That big pharma is indeed so big—”no half-billion-dollar market, no product”—meant that there was a niche to fill. She discovered “an entirely new approach to developing drugs and bringing them to market in poor places.”

But The Coming Prosperity is more than a series of case studies. Mr. Auerswald, an associate professor at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, digs down to show the many ways in which progress depends on creativity, not to mention persistence and luck. The material in The Coming Prosperity is sometimes dense, but Mr. Auerswald compensates with a lively writing style, and the analysis is lightened with personal anecdotes and pop-culture references.

I haven’t yet read the other two books included in this review, but will be doing so. I’m particularly looking forward to Vijay’s book, as he has long impressed me with his insightful writing for The Economist on energy and other global issues.

“If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.” – Norman Augustine

Look around you and you will see … well, it depends where you are, I guess. But if you’re in the US or another advanced industrialized country, odds are that you’ll see evidence everywhere of one or another large-scale technical system to which you are connected. A stove (gas lines). A light (electric power grid). A plug-in telephone (landline). The very air you breathe. All in your physical environment but at the same time connected to one or more large technical systems built and maintained by other people.

Now, when one of these large complex systems fails, the natural tendency is to seek the cause and to assign blame. Think the crash of the space shuttles Columbia (O-ring failure) and Challenger (loose foam); the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina (levy failure); the sinking of the Titanic (iceberg spotting failure).

In the last of these cases, that of the Titanic, new analysis is blunting long-standing assignments of blame. As reported in the New York Times earlier this week, recently published studies suggest that natural phenomena may have conspired to make the night of the Titanic’s sinking a tragically inopportune one for the maiden voyage of monstrous ship seeking to break a trans-Atlantic speed record. The Earth’s exceptional proximity to the Moon on that night resulted in higher tides and more sea ice than usual; the large amount of sea ice, in turn, created an optical illusion that made the ice, well, harder to see (pun only somewhat intended). “There were no heroes, no villains,” one of the researchers interviewed by the Times concludes. “Instead, there were a lot of human beings trying to do their best in the situation as they saw it.”

Now a couple of years ago, during the Toyota brake failure controversy, I wrote a post in which I described various breakdowns of complex systems as versions of the well-known “Blue Screen of Death” (BSoD) phenomenon experienced by users of Windows-based computers:

Recognizing that society’s operating system = computers + the built environment + people, the BSoD itself becomes a ubiquitous metaphor. The Challenger and Columbia crashes. The Northeast power blackout. Katrina. All BSoD phenomena in one way or another.

Now let’s get back to the Blue Screen we started with–the one on your computer. How do you deal with it? We all know that the only way to deal with the BSoD is to expect it to happen, to prepare accordingly, and to get good at recovering rapidly. In other words, you need to be resilient. After all, what good is weeks, months, or years of efficient, productive work if it all gets lost in one Blue Screen.

One hundred years after the sinking of the Titanic, it’s time we registered this lesson. The story of the sinking is one full of human drama. But all that drama–and the search for causal explanation and blame that it provokes–shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing the real historical significance of the sinking: as the first of many failures of large-scale technical-human systems.

Fortunately, as the excellent contributions to a book I co-edited a few years ago examine in detail, an accumulation of business experience and scholarship has taught us something about how to increase the resilience of large technical systems. As former NASA administrator Bob Frosch summarizes:

In the attempt to create a high reliability organization, the greatest problem seems to be achieving the balance between organizational discipline (necessary for its existence and stability) and the open, informal structure needed for a functioning team… Formal discipline can destroy exactly those properties of the team that make it function.

The same problem exists at the scale of society as a whole. When systems fail, the tendency to seek a causal explanation and to assign blame–to understand, in a sense, why no one spotted the iceberg–is natural. But such exercises ultimately do more harm than good if they operate under the illusion that it is possible to reduce to zero the probability of accidents, of attack, of failure, of fraud, or other adverse events that may occur in a complex human society.

A much better approach is to simplify large-technical systems wherever possible, reducing layers of function and increasing redundancies in a strategic manner. One way to do this is to encourage entrepreneurial entry and decentralization in the provision of essential services. At the same time, it is imperative that operators of large technical systems have the capacity not only to identify a disaster in the making, but also to respond quickly and recover gracefully when disaster (inevitably) does strike. As Tim Harford and Nilofer Merchant have pointed out in broader contexts, that means nurturing entrepreneur-like adaptability among front-line workers even in otherwise hierarchal organizations.

Bottom line: If we’re going to get anything practical out of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, it should be this: Enough with the icebergs already.

Here’a another kid today.

So where do we find the wonderful, inspired people of all ages who will bring about the coming prosperity? That’s right. Everywhere.

You also can’t be surprised at a bit of reflexive skepticism, as evidenced by this announcement of a talk I’m giving on April 18 at Artisphere in Arlington, VA: “With a title like that, one should expect some ‘happy talk…’”

Fine. But, just for the record, I don’t see my book as being optimistic, nor do I regard myself personally as “an optimist.” Why not?

I have a simple working definition of optimism: An optimist is someone who is chronically late.

The reason that optimists are (by definition) people who are chronically late is that optimism is the state of mis-comprehending the true, underlying statistical distribution of potential outcomes. “Let’s see, ” the optimist says to himself. “It’s 250 miles from DC to New York. My wedding ceremony in mid-town Manhattan starts at 5pm. I’m sure that I can average 50 miles per hour. That’s five hours. So I’ll leave home at noon.” Not good, right? (… and anyone who’s been a groom or bridegroom knows I’m not making this stuff up.)

Optimism can also be kind of sad. In my case, I would be an optimist if I believed that the hair on the top of my head was going to grow back. Soon. But here’s the thing: that’s not happening. To comprehend this fact is to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It’s simply to understand and accept reality.

Now, to be honest, given my “optimists are perpetually late” definition, my mother would say that I am an, in fact, an optimist–or a recovering optimist, at best. And I would have a hard time arguing with her on that one. So, given that I may be more vulnerable to this characterization than I’m letting on, why would I make matters worse by titling my book The Coming Prosperity?

Here’s the thing: I’m not selling optimism. I’m shorting fear.

As we all know, the market for fear is a lively one. We see people selling fear all the time. We call such people “fear-mongers,” which literally means “sellers of fear.” They do it because it works. Lots of people buy fear. The evidence abounds.

However, fear mostly generates poor decisions and conflict. I title chapter 13 of the The Coming Prosperity “Fear Itself ” because I agree with FDR: “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” If that’s happy talk, then you can say you heard it from Dr. Boom.

So that’s why I titled the book the way I did. And I am far from the only person right now who sees positive trends all around. (Ref here and here, for example.) Indeed, my George Mason University colleague Tyler Cowen is featured on the cover of the May-June issue of The American Interest with a piece about an export-led American resurgence. Has the author of The Great Stagnation suddenly turned into an “optimist”?

No, Tyler is no more an optimist than I am. We’re both trying to do what we’re ostensibly paid to do: use fact-based analysis to the best of our abilities to describe, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, “the true interpretation of the trend of things.” (Ref the opening quote in The Coming Prosperity for more.)

Has the moment arrived for a message about the remarkable potential of the present moment on the global scale? I’d say, read The Coming Prosperity and decide for yourself. But you won’t be surprised to hear me, as the author, express my delight in finding that  the book’s message is arriving none too late. Indeed, it turns out to be right on time.

“How the World Gets Ahead,” Matthew Rees, The Wall Street Journal

The Coming Prosperity is filled with vivid profiles of men and women who have succeeded under harsh conditions…But The Coming Prosperity is more than a series of case studies. Mr. Auerswald, an associate professor at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, digs down to show the many ways in which progress depends on creativity, not to mention persistence and luck.

“Jack Covert Selects – The Coming Prosperity,”Jack Covert, 800CEOread.com

In the second section of the book, the human-scale part of the narrative, Auerswald brilliantly charts the economic subtext of the twentieth century, “the rise and partial fall of large scale, centralized production” that got us to where we are today, and explores the prospects for an ever-brighter future…You will see the genesis of people moving through economies being built, big ideas becoming simple reality, the sweeping arc of history in his writing.

Dr. Boom,” Dalibor Rohac, City Journal (4/3/2012)

From stories of entrepreneurs like Aziz and Venkataswamy, Philip Auerswald, an economist at George Mason University, builds a compelling narrative of economic optimism… Economic development isn’t only about access to drinking water, health care, and food, says Auerswald; it’s also about empowerment.

“Book Review: The Coming Prosperity,” Rod Dubitsky, BRAC USA blog (4/3/2012)

Auerswald paints a picture of a world economic ecosystem driven not purely by greed, but desire to change, improve, and have a positive impact on the world around us. While this “coming prosperity” doesn’t preclude the profit motive, it will emanate from far more complicated factors.

“3 Books Well Worth Reading,” Nilofer Merchant, Yes and Know

This is a book about how to think of the 3 billion people who will join the global economy in the next quarter century, as partners rather than competitors, as sources rather than sinks… It is a book written by a deep global thinker.

“Nonfiction Review:  The Coming Prosperity,” Publishers Weekly (3/5/2012)

George Mason University public policy professor Auerswald brings with him a message of hope and prosperity about global economic growth, with a wealth of historical data, facts, and anecdotes to support it… With compelling writing, Auerswald offers an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

“The Coming Prosperity,” Tyler Cowen, MarginalRevolution.com (1/3/2012)

The author is the highly intelligent Philip Auerswald and the subtitle is How Entrepreneurs are Transforming the Global Economy.  I am less optimistic about the next ten years, but this is a very well-argued book.

Print Interviews

“How the Rise of the Developing World Will Help Americans,” interview with Richard Florida, AtlanticCities.com (March 22, 2012)

Where others see the U.S. economy being overtaken by China and falling victim to long-run decline and economic stagnation, Auerswald argues that the world as a whole is on the verge of a new period of unparalleled prosperity.

Video Interviews

Photo: Street scene in Mazār-i-Sharīf, Afghanistan. Credit: Jan Chipchase, Frog Design. More: http://janchipchase.com/content/presentations-and-downloads/the-mobile-frontier/