dogwelder

In Europe and Asia, I'd expect so. In the States, fossil fuel interests have already mobilized their media campaign, pushing for new taxes to penalize local solar energy generation. They've had some victories and some losses, but as another poster mentioned, they don't have to win every battle - just enough to sow uncertainty on whether it'll be a good investment.

I think because, there's no reason to assume they would be - labor costs are still (mostly) driven by supply and demand. If gizmos and computers and internets increase a worker's productivity, the gains go to the business owners, while the worker still gets paid at whatever the labor market decides. (During the 60's era wage earners had some natural advantages: booming demand for labor, restricted supply since single-income households were the norm, less ability to send manufacturing or service jobs offshore.)

Higher top rates in the 60's era also meant some of that productivity gain in wealth went back to the average worker. The whole economy gained wealth from public investment in infrastructure, funding for education, healthcare research and so on. But around the late 70's, the tide started to turn towards lower taxes at the top. A few more trends got rolling at the same time: technology that made big productivity gains possible; entire manufacturing industries being sent overseas; the financial industry getting really interested in ways to move existing wealth from where it was, to their own pockets.

That makes it sound entirely bad, which it wasn't... those trends also led to a slew of innovative new companies, disruptions to established business practices, stock options as a way to share in the risk and reward, and lots of cool gadgets. It's more interesting now than in 1960. But there are a lot of workers getting the shaft, and don't necessarily need to be.

That chart shows per capita income without adjusting for inflation. It's not very useful for drawing conclusions about real income.

And per capita is a simple average, while looking at medians or quintiles gives you a clearer picture. Per capita, a roomful of middle class workers all become billionaires if Bill Gates walks in.

I'm inclined to agree. It's striking how the graph showing the wealth flow to the top 1% correlates with changes to the capital gains tax rate. There are benefits to a low cap gains rate, but below a certain level, it seems associated with slower growth, more of the income flowing to the top, and more volatility and crashes.

You can make the argument it's goosing the economy to concentrate more and more capital into a single point of failure, a deeply interconnected network of financial firms. And you gotta wonder what the economy would look like, if Wall Street hadn't been siphoning off so much of the brains and capital to play card tricks. It might otherwise have gone towards, say, innovations in healthcare, transportation, energy, even domestic manufacturing.

It might be just an inherent lag between optimized mass consumption, and new innovative production. Scaling the Web out to the mass market happened first, next-generation innovations like Google showed up later. It is discouraging the direction is moving toward walled gardens. But there's a plus side to getting the platform out there to millions, making it more valuable to build innovations on. I can live with it as long as it's not one company owning the whole market, or a hundred small incompatible ones.

Machines optimized for creating stuff keep getting better, and aren't going away. I don't think it's necessarily bad if those machines drop to a smaller market share. It's usually a much smaller percent of people who create the apps and content that aren't crap anyway, and most of the consumer audience goes to them. Getting optimized video production machines out to the masses via cellphones is cool, but it's not really improving the average video on YouTube.

For creative ideas at the OS and interaction levels though... yeah, the platform owners need or want to own most of it. I think they're OK with jailbreaking the platform to the extent it creates a testing ground for new ideas, that they can then adopt.