Re: [Pen-l] Doug Henwood, Anwar Shaikh, and financial crisis

[raghu <mraghu01@xxxxxxxxx>]

While I agree with most of what you write in this article, I am not sure about the following:

> To start with, there are few prospects on the horizon that will deliver the kind of dynamism that smokestack industries provided during earlier stages of capitalist development. The last such jolt of energy occurred with the computer revolution which began in the 1950s and has already reached maturity. With Dell Computers selling for around $300, you are clearly dealing with an economic wave in its final stages.

I think the computer revolution is far from being in its final stages. It is true that PCs are becoming a commodity - which is bad news for Dell, but to take just one example the iPhone is substantially more expensive than the old GSM phones that the carriers used to give away for free. It is also true that Moore-law scaling of CMOS processes may finally be at its end, but new highly parallel architectures (e.g. the so-called GPGPUs essentially massively multi-core processors) may continue to increase the data processing power. In fact looking at the massive data centers that Google, Amazon etc are building, there is a real chance that the computer revolution may end up being more environmentally destructive than the automobile.

In addition to computers, there is also a great deal of excitement among academics over alternative energy, synthetic biology and nano-tech which are not entirely without foundation. Each of these have the potential to give rise to another economic revolution.

-raghu.

-- 
"Why is the man (or woman) who invests all your money called a broker?" - George Carlin

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