US President-elect Joe Biden may have promised a “return to normalcy,” but the truth is that there is no going back. The world is changing in fundamental ways, and the actions the world takes in the next few years will be critical to lay the groundwork for a sustainable, secure, and prosperous future.
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NEW YORK – History shows that the interactions between a mission-driven state, financial speculators, and the market economy – what I call the Three-Player Game – can marshal the funding needed to drive technological innovation beyond the frontier of visible economic value and commercial exploitation. Over time, the fruits of such innovation have transformed the market economy itself.
Both World War II and the Cold War offered what even the Great Depression could not: a rationale for state intervention to direct the allocation of resources in the private sector. And within living memory, the state has played a decisive and legitimate role in guiding the development of information and communications technology (ICT).
In the 18 years since the collapse of the dot-com bubble, however, the relationship between the technology sector and the state has been reversed. ICT’s growth to maturity depended on state-supported research and procurement. But now the sector is leading a full-fledged transformation of economic, social, and political life, comparable in scale and scope to the advent of the railroads and electrification.
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