Friday, June 24, 2016

Digital Age and Current Economy



Any man-made systems are bearing their limitations, due to the limitations of human. Therefore, these systems will run down eventually just a matter of time. The evidence can be found in the stream of human civilizations, let alone the man-made computer systems. This includes the man-made social systems and structures. To survive, we need continuous evolution and revolution. The current revolution towards Digital Age can be considered as a case in line.
Our current economic, financial, and social structures are mostly established to suit Industrial Age, which are distorting in Digital Age. For example, the stock markets were established to connect investors with businesses for their investments to business growth, and to benefit from such activities. However, the stock trading becomes the major business of its own since the online-trading was born in 90s, and the trading techniques and tools are improving continuously with Internet and digital technology advancement. We can see that the trading volumes dramatically increased since 90s, and began to decrease after 2009 recession. However, the financial engineering stayed in its milestone scales, due to government rescue. Gradually, the economic scale in financial engineering surpassed the one in Main Street productions, which caused and worsened wealth divide, since the rich people have more spare money to participate in financial engineering. In our capitalism system, people are chasing capital gains naturally, doesn’t matter it’s from Main Street or Wall Street.

This trend has to be broken for the society to be productive again. The current trend of connected digital world with shared economies, shared infrastructures, shared resources, and shared knowledge is shining the light for making this to happen. We may have to go through a dark period of time before dawning, such as in current stagnated world economy. The important thing is that we should know the direction we are heading to, and to build into it.
We need visionary leaders in this world!

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