Recent quotes:
Why has a revolution that is supposed to be as historically important as the industrial revolution coincided with a period of broader economic decline? I posed the question in one form or another to everyone I talked to in the Bay Area. The answers became a measure of how people in the technology industry think about the world beyond it.Few of them had given the topic much consideration. One young techie wondered if it was really true; another said that the problem was a shortage of trained software engineers; a third noted that the focus of the tech industry was shifting from engineering to design, and suggested that this would open up new job opportunities. Sam Lessin, who leads Facebook’s “identity product group,” which is in charge of the social network’s Timeline feature, posited that traditional measures of wealth might not be applicable in the era of social media. He said, “I think as communication technology gets less expensive, and people can entertain each other and interact with each other and do things for each other much more efficiently, what’s actually going to happen is that the percentage of the economy that’s in cash is going to decline. Some people will choose to build social capital rather than financial capital. Given the opportunity to spend an extra hour or an extra dollar, they will choose to spend time with friends. It might be that the G.D.P., in the broader sense, is actually growing quite quickly—it’s just that we’re not measuring it properly.”