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By 2025, technologies that raise productivity by automating jobs that are not practical to automate today could be on their way to widespread adoption. …  Given the large numbers of jobs that could be affected by technologies such as advanced robotic and automated knowledge work, policy makers should consider the potential consequences of increasing divergence between the fates of highly skilled workers and those with fewer skills. The existing problem of a creating a labor force that fits the demands of a high-tech economy will only grow over time.

America’s future does not have to be “Bladerunner with food stamps.” But to avoid that, we need entrepreneurs to keep inventing new ways of combining technology and better-educated workers to create new industries and innovations. And government has a role to play in creating a fertile environment for education and entrepreneurship.

Failure could mean, writes Walter Russell Mead, the US ends up with the “mother of all welfare states [where] something like 80 percent or more of the population is going become superfluous to the economy. There will be no jobs where the work of this group could command a living wage; the state must somehow make provision for them or wait for them to fall into poverty and risk the social explosion that will probably follow.” And a  demoralized, stagnant society is more likely to push for redistributionist policies that will ensure the stagnation is permanent.

What is missing from the stampede of policy innovation is something to tackle one of the best-known causes of high costs in the book: excessive market concentration.

The share of metropolitan areas with highly concentrated hospital markets, by the standards of antitrust enforcers at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, rose to 77 percent from 63 percent over the period.

And consolidation is continuing. Professor Gaynor counts more than 1,000 hospital system mergers since the mid-1990s, often involving dozens of hospitals. In 2002 doctors owned about three in four physician practices. By 2008 more than half were owned by hospitals.

every boss now also has cheaper, easier, faster access to more above-average software, automation, robotics, cheap labor and cheap genius than ever before. That means the old average is over. Everyone who wants a job now must demonstrate how they can add value better than the new alternatives.

the speed with which every job and industry changes also goes into hypermode. “In the old days,” he said, “it was assumed that your educational foundation would last your whole lifetime. That is no longer true.”

the skill required for every decent job is rising as is the necessity of lifelong learning. More and more things you know and tools you use “are being made obsolete faster,

Mr Mankiw begins with a thought experiment: "Imagine a society with perfect economic equality...Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies." Everyone wants to buy the entrepreneur's product, which results in a hugely unequal distribution of income. Should the government shift to a progressive tax system to reduce the inequality?Obviously Mr Mankiw discovers that the answer is "no", because that's the answer he has built his analogy to produce.

Mr Mankiw's analogy sneaks in his conclusion by implying that greater inequality is the price we pay for more invention and creativity. But his own choices of hero-entrepreneurs make it clear that there's no evidence to support this claim.

Of the three Mr Mankiw proposes, only Steve Jobs plausibly had an irreducible, unique effect on material culture and the structure of an industry. Mr Spielberg and Ms Rowling are acclaimed artists, but their startling wealth and prominence are entirely due to the increasing power of network effects in mass culture over the past several decades. Mr Spielberg happened to be directing his first movies just as Hollywood was beginning to stage coordinated marketing blitzes that created round-the-block lines for top-grossing films. Ms Rowling hit the bookshelves just as a similar superstar phenomenon was taking over publishing, with sales increasingly concentrated on individual mega-bestsellers rather than spread across a few dozen authors and titles. Mr Jobs is an unusual figure in that his ability to combine engineering, aesthetics, and a vision of how users might interact with the digital universe has created a kind of integrated multi-product entity that might not otherwise have existed; it's not clear that BlackBerry, Nokia or Samsung would have been up to the task. But even in Mr Jobs's case, much of the power that accrued to Apple was due to the gradual sorting of the consumer information-technology world into integrated ecosystems

The Industrial Revolution -- an innovative period between the mid-18th and 19th centuries -- thrust people from a predominantly agricultural existence into a more urban lifestyle.

Lost in the lore is Mr. Grove’s critique of Silicon Valley in an essay he wrote in 2010 in Bloomberg Businessweek. According to Mr. Grove, Silicon Valley was squandering its competitive edge in innovation by failing to propel strong job growth in the United States.

Mr. Grove acknowledged that it was cheaper and thus more profitable for companies to hire workers and build factories in Asia than in the United States. But in his view, those lower Asian costs masked the high price of offshoring as measured by lost jobs and lost expertise. Silicon Valley misjudged the severity of those losses, he wrote, because of a “misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create U.S. jobs.”

Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.”

what was the prime mover, the dislodged stone that set this eventful cascade in motion? It was, perhaps, the invention of weapons — an event that let human ancestors escape the brutal tyranny of the alpha male that dominated ape societies.

The two principal traits that underlie the human evolutionary success, in Dr. Hill’s view, are the unusual ability of nonrelatives to cooperate — in almost all other species, only closely related individuals will help each other — and social learning, the ability to copy and learn from what others are doing. A large social network can generate knowledge and adopt innovations far more easily than a cluster of small, hostile groups constantly at war with each other, the default state of chimpanzee society.

the answer to how humans became unique lies in exploring how human societies first split away from those of apes.

Stimulus size is not the key factor in determining how quickly a country emerges from recession. The U.S. tried big, but is emerging slowly. The Germans tried small, and are recovering nicely.

the Germans have built on their advantages. They effectively support basic research and worker training. They have also taken brave measures to minimize their disadvantages. As an editorial from the superb online think tank e21 reminds us, the Germans have recently reduced labor market regulation, increased wage flexibility and taken strong measures to balance budgets.

American policy makers have done little to maximize their model’s natural advantages or address its problems. Indeed, they’ve only made the short-term thinking problem worse, with monetary, fiscal and home-ownership policies encouraging even more borrowing and consumption.

America is an increasingly conservative nation, by ideology and by political affiliation,

Conservatives outnumber liberals in even the most liberal-leaning states (excluding the District of Columbia): Vermont, (30.7% conservative to 30.5% liberal), Rhode Island (29.9% to 29.3%), and Massachusetts (29.9% to 28.0%).

what factors account for the growing conservatism of Americans and American states?

“The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer,” said Gina Bianchini, the woman who had appeared on the cover of Fortune. “So why hasn’t our generation of women moved the needle?”

identity politics pushed many people into homogeneous groups; Scott Walker, one of the only African-Americans in the class to try founding a start-up, said in an interview that he regretted spending so much time at his all-black fraternity, which took him away from the white friends from freshman year who went on to found and then invest in technology companies.

If the dawn of the start-up era meant that consumer-oriented ideas were becoming more important than proprietary technology, he asked himself aloud, shouldn’t more women have flooded in?

One thing seems clear to me: nobody — not experts or policymakers or people in these communities — seems to know quite how to pick rural America up.

States, municipalities and the federal government have spent billions to draw jobs and prosperity to stagnant rural areas. But they haven’t yet figured out how to hitch this vast swath of the country to the tech-heavy economy that is flourishing in America’s cities.

There are 1,888 counties in America in which more than half the population is rural, according to the Census Bureau, and they stretch from coast to coast.

Asian investors directed nearly as much money into startups last year as American investors did—40% of the record $154 billion in global venture financing versus 44%,

Asia’s share is up from less than 5% just 10 years ago.

That tidal wave of cash into promising young firms could herald a shift in who controls the world’s technological innovation and its economic fruits, from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars.

A company in Liechtenstein built the world’s fastest roller coaster, part of a niche industry combining innovation with no economies of scale

ABU DHABI—The world’s fastest roller coaster, which can reach 149 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds, is at an amusement park called—what else?—Ferrari World, in Abu Dhabi.

The tiny alpine principality, sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, is one of a handful of European countries that dominate the niche business of producing roller coasters.

a carbon roadmap, driven by a simple rule of thumb or "carbon law" of halving emissions every decade, could catalyse disruptive innovation.

The authors say fossil-fuel emissions should peak by 2020 at the latest and fall to around zero by 2050 to meet the UN's Paris Agreement's climate goal of limiting the global temperature rise to "well below 2°C" from preindustrial times.

A "carbon law" approach, say the international team of scientists, ensures that the greatest efforts to reduce emissions happens sooner not later

Even at their most effective – and draconian – containment strategies have only slowed the spread of the respiratory disease Covid-19. With the World Health Organization finally declaring a pandemic, all eyes have turned to the prospect of a vaccine, because only a vaccine can prevent people from getting sick.

This unprecedented speed is thanks in large part to early Chinese efforts to sequence the genetic material of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. China shared that sequence in early January, allowing research groups around the world to grow the live virus and study how it invades human cells and makes people sick.

Coronaviruses have caused two other recent epidemics – severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in China in 2002-04, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), which started in Saudi Arabia in 2012. In both cases, work began on vaccines that were later shelved when the outbreaks were contained. One company, Maryland-based Novavax, has now repurposed those vaccines for Sars-CoV-2, and says it has several candidates ready to enter human trials this spring. Moderna, meanwhile, built on earlier work on the Mers virus conducted at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland.

White House economists published a study last September that warned a pandemic disease could kill a half million Americans and devastate the economy.It went unheeded inside the administration.

In an interview, she said it would encompass school closures, shutting down many businesses and the sort of stay-at-home orders that many, but not all, states have imposed.“What it entails is something as drastic as you can get,”

Public health threats did not typically hurt the economy, Mr. Philipson said. He suggested the virus would not be nearly as bad as a normal flu season.

Even at their most effective – and draconian – containment strategies have only slowed the spread of the respiratory disease Covid-19. With the World Health Organization finally declaring a pandemic, all eyes have turned to the prospect of a vaccine, because only a vaccine can prevent people from getting sick.

About 35 companies and academic institutions are racing to create such a vaccine, at least four of which already have candidates they have been testing in animals. The first of these – produced by Boston-based biotech firm Moderna – will enter human trials imminently.

This unprecedented speed is thanks in large part to early Chinese efforts to sequence the genetic material of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19

The potential for outbreaks to spread uncontrollably is particularly high in low-income countries where inadequate public health systems are unable to effectively track and respond to new diseases or to treat people who are infected

These countries are also limited in their ability to pay for vaccines, which is why the organization I run, Gavi, the Vaccine Allianc

substantially more financial help will be required if large numbers of vulnerable people are to be vaccinated. Otherwise, reservoirs of the virus will remain and continue to spread

Historically, however, the level of government spending and the level of regulation have been packaged together and treated as a single variable. This has forced a choice between two options: the “liberal” package of big government and heavy regulation or the “conservative” package of small government and light regulation.

But this is a false choice. Regulatory policy and fiscal policy are independent dimensions, and they can be rebundled in different packages. Mr. Trump’s gestures toward a big-government, low-regulation package — rooted more in instinct than intellect — proved popular with Republican voters

Republicans need to recognize finally that secure property rights, openness to global trade and a relatively low regulatory burden are much more important than fiscal policy for innovation, job creation and rising standards of