Cities of Tomorrow

The New Cities Foundation put together a short video about urban expansion that describes the need for re-imagined cities with 21st century infrastructure.  It is well worth watching.  Notice the many clips of Songdo and interviews with people connected to the massive project.

Cities of Tomorrow

Predicting Global Economic Trends

Skybox Imaging

While Big Data firms often struggle to find applications for their hordes of information, Skybox moves from a data collection firm to a business packaging highly useful information.  Using aerial imagery and video from a fleet of micro-satellites, Skybox applies computer algorithms to analyze, track, and predict global economic trends.  The Wall Street Journal explains:

"In 2010, an analyst at UBS discovered that if he bought satellite images of parking lots of Wal-Mart stores, he could predict the company's sales figures before they were revealed in its quarterly earnings report, because cars in lots equal shoppers in stores.

"We're looking at Foxconn every week," Mr. Berkenstock [co-founder of Skybox] says, because measuring the density of trucks outside the Taiwanese company's manufacturing facilities tells Skybox when the next iPhone will be released.

"Skybox can determine how much oil is being pumped out of the ground in Saudi Arabia by imaging oil-storage tanks from above. The company can peg the likely price of grain months in advance by measuring the health of every square yard of cropland on Earth." -- Amid Stratospheric Valuations, Google Unearths a Deal With Skybox, Wall Street Journal, 6/15/2014

Google reported purchased Skybox for $500 million.  This acquisition emphasizes the search giant's continued goal of revolutionizing the world's access to new sources of information.

Predicting Global Economic Trends

Economic Growth

The Importance of Broadband Expansion on Economic Growth

In the US, "for every one percentage point increase in broadband penetration in a state, employment is projected to increase by 0.2 to 0.3 percent per year...A 7 percentage point boost in national broadband adoption could lead to $662 million in annual healthcare savings, and $6.4 billion in annual mileage savings...[In Michigan] just one percentage point increase in broadband penetration could create or save approximately 12,388 jobs statewide." -- Broadband’s Economic Impact in Michigan, InfrastructureUSA, also see Technology Infrastructure

The Importance of Economic Growth in Indian Politics

In India, if a minister oversees rapid growth within his state, "each extra percentage point of growth raises the chances of [a candidate from that minister's party] winning a seat in the national parliament by 5-6 percentage points." -- The Capitalist Manifesto: How to Get India Moving Again

Economic Growth

SimCity: An Urban Planner’s Perspective (Guest Post written by Brandon McKoy)

The day has finally arrived. The day I, and thousands of others, have been looking forward to for over a decade. The day when we could once again cobble together our conditions for a perfect living environment and hope they create a blossoming education and clean energy utopia instead of a society bereft with crime and poverty. Today is the day that SimCity, the venerated city simulation series that has helped spawn a generation of urban planners, releases for the PC – don’t worry Apple owners, a version for you is just around the corner in Spring.

Layer function allows players
to experience "the data of everything"
Photo Source: Polygon SimCity Review

I was lucky enough to play the three beta tests of the new SimCity and was thoroughly impressed with how easy it is to access information on my city’s performance. At the click of a button players are able to bring up data layers that graphically show how a city is running, from whether the potable water is polluted to which areas of the city don’t have proper access to education. This makes it easier to determine how to tackle your city’s problems as players know exactly what problems exist and where these occur.

Just like any real city, when changes are instituted they have effects in other areas, usually creating a different set of problems for players to deal with down the line.  During the Beta tests I started a recycling program for my city, but I needed to upgrade my roads so that my trucks could get around town and collect recyclables quickly enough to keep up with demand.  Once I was able to breakdown the recyclables and send them to my trade port, I then had to decide whether to ship them through the freight depot or send them to my commercial and clean industrial entities. Of course all of this required a sufficient traffic system that makes it easy for deliveries and pick-ups. Only later did I realize that by focusing on this worthy endeavor I had completely overlooked my power plant's continuing need for coal from the world market, causing some of my buildings to be abandoned due to lack of power. Like I said, focus and changes in one area can lead to problems in others if you're not careful - you really have to spin multiple plates at once to keep things rolling smoothly.

The game has been built from the bottom up this time around, with the Sims who reside in your city making decisions about where they will work, live, and play in real-time. This means that everything that happens in your city is the result of citizens reacting to what you have constructed, making it a simulation that is incredibly close to being able to replicate real-world conditions – in fact, some people are already using the game for modeling.

A new addition to the game is regional play which allows a player and others in his network to control their own cities in a region together. This provides the opportunity to share services between cities and help out one another. For instance, in Beta play, when my city was having a crime problem and my police force couldn't keep up, another city in the region volunteered some of their police cars to patrol my city and help out.

Nuclear power plant lighting the city
Photo Source: Brandon McKoy

Regional play allows more than just sharing of services – each region has a “Great Works Site” which allows cities to work together to create something spectacular. This feature provides the ability for cities to collaborate on a project that will benefit the entire region and requires players to coordinate their activities in pursuit of a collective goal. For example, having a good education system leads to research projects that unlock larger developments in the game, such as an international airport, more efficient wind turbines, or a space station. All of the cities in the region can then work together to provide the necessary resources to construct these projects. Collaboration happens along the lines of a residential city providing students to a educational city/university town, which provides skilled workers to build the international airport in the industrial city, which ultimately provides passenger access the tourism city, and so on and so forth. None of this would be possible without intercity collaboration.

Keep reading »

SimCity: An Urban Planner’s Perspective (Guest Post written by Brandon McKoy)

Shaping the City of Tomorrow

While I haven't been active on the blog recently, I've been managing to keep busy.  I'll try to post more of my works that I've dedicated my time to these past few months.  We'll start with city building...

 

 (Click pages to enlarge)

Shaping the City of Tomorrow

Technology Infrastructure

“A 2009 World Bank study found that raising mobile-phone penetration in a developing country by ten percentage points increased GDP growth by 0.8% a year.” – The Economist, Telecommunications in Brazil,8/11/2012

Every publication about technology’s effect on the developing world always reminds me of my first exposure living in Latin America.  While living on an island off the shore of Costa Rica, I spent time with a subsistence fisherman who used a cellphone to work his way out of poverty.  Outfitted with the technology of a cellphone, the fisherman could check market prices of fish in the capital city and break the tradition of get ripped off by wholesalers at the local pier.

World Bank, 2010

The spread of cheap technology is extremely encouraging in how it revolutionizes economic development.  While new technologies and gadgets have changed Western economies, their affects are strongly felt in low and middle income countries even more so.  In a 2010 study, the World Bank found that for every 10 percent increase in broadband access, developing economies accelerated growth by 1.38 percent (for comparison, total US growth hovers at 1.7 percent).

Capitalizing on this trend, Campus Tecnológico in Guatemala created an urban enclave of telecommunications facilitated businesses and start-ups.  As part of a three phased public/private development collaboration, Campus Tech aims to change the Central American technology industry by investing in young entrepreneurs and providing them with broadband infrastructure and local database centers.  Campus Tech has already facilitated 28 start-ups and has subscription backlogs for the first phase of its wired office-complex.  “In Guatemala,” reads a NYTimes article on Campus Tech, “many entrepreneurs have been focusing on the union of technology and social policy, creating things like affordable water filters, or a program for distributing health information to cellphones.”  

Technology infrastructure and their facilitators like Campus Tech truly have the power to drastically stimulate economies and alter life in developing countries.

Technology Infrastructure

Eco-Industrial Parks

Eco-Industrial Parks (EIPs) cluster manufacturing plants in a single location where the by-products of one facility contribute to the inputs of other onsite facilities.  Seeking to create circular economies that recycle waste and encourage the sharing and integration of resources and infrastructure, EIPs facilitate “cleaner production within companies and design of both primary and by-product chains among companies.”  By promoting closed systems manufacturing, these parks encourage the local consumption of goods and recycling of by-product waste.  Incorporating a systems approach to these processes, EIPs can revolutionize sustainable industrial development.

Traditional industrial parks capitalize on the economic benefits of clustering.  The clustering of related business activity leads firms to gain additional productive advantages through increased specialization (in terms of human capital and physical infrastructure) and through efficient infrastructure networks.  Industrial parks typically concentrate like-businesses and companies around a common economic sector to capture these efficiencies. 

Instead of concentrating businesses based on a single industry, EIPs take clustering one step further – they create closed “waste-to-feed” resource systems.  EIPs assemble groups of companies based on waste production and inputs.  Planners and management teams organize eco-industrial parks by first identifying the by-products of large anchor tenants.  “If a major by-product supply stream will be an attractor to companies that can use it,” observes Ernest Lowe in an EIP case study, “then [EIPs] use that in recruitment.”   Planners and management teams embark down a successive chain of recruiting businesses that use the anchor tenants’ by-products as inputs and subsequently search for others who could utilize the next set of industrial by-products.  EIPs thus foster the development of closed resource systems and the perpetuation of circular economies.

At Hemaraj Eastern Seaboard Industrial Estates (HESIE) , an EIP located along the Gulf of Thailand, an automotive cluster sustains a 420-factory circular economy.  Anchored by Thailand’s automotive production lines, excess scrap metal is sold to parts manufacturers, to electronics companies, and to building-material factories within the industrial complex.  Plastics firms and agrochemical businesses reuse by-product gases produced at an electrical generation plant and at the automotive factories.  Co-generation heat capture powers additional energy throughout the industrial park.  

Similarly, the Industrial Symbiosis park in Kalundborg, Denmark houses 20 integrated firms.  Centered on a coal-fired power plant, excess heat from cooling water is directed to local fish farms and excess steam routed to the biotech facilities for enzyme production.  Both the fish farms and the pharmaceutical companies produce agricultural fertilizers as bi-products for pig feed in the nearby farms, which then feed Kalundborg’s residents.  Ash from the power plant is also used by the local cement company.  And a plasterboard manufacture utilizes the power plant’s sulfur dioxide and gypsum bi-products.

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Eco-Industrial Parks

Economic Success in Germany's Mittelstand

Economic Success in Germany's Mittelstand

Hedonistic Sustainability

In this TED Talk with Bjarke Ingels, the world renowned architect demonstrates how innovative design can creatively integrate buildings with society.  A new city hall in Thailand incorporates government transparency and public participation in physical form by making conference rooms open to public view from the outside.  A waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen draws a mountain form into the Copenhagen skyline (with rooftop ski slope included!).  The power plant also raises awareness of carbon emissions by releasing the gaseous byproduct in equally measured smoke rings to give residents a psychical interpretation of one ton of CO2.  In what is most likely the first Just a Thought... post on architecture, the cultural implications and the pure "wow" factor of the Bjarke Ingels Group's works speak for themselves.  Expect to see new Bjarke Ingels inspired constructions across the world in the 21st century.

Good looking out to Mr. Pomeroy for finding this video.

Hedonistic Sustainability

City-Scale Development: A Look into How New Cities Ease the Infrastructure Burdens of the 21st Century

Karachi, Pakistan, houses 13 million residents and presides over 95% of Pakistan’s foreign trade, but poor infrastructure destines the overcrowded megacity to endure everlasting poverty.  The Karachi Mega Development Project report of 2005 blatantly acknowledges that the deteriorated quality of Karachi’s infrastructure “impacts adversely on the country’s economic growth and development prospects.”  Households allege to only having running water for a few hours every other day.  Pipe leakages lose an estimated 50% of all drinkable water and the leaks’ detriments to water pressure only exacerbate the problem.  Nonetheless, the shortfalls of the sewage systems make the water network admirable in comparison. 

Only one quarter of Karachi’s sewage successfully journeys through “undersized and broken sections” of the sewage network to the city’s wastewater treatment plants.  Once there, the plants suffer from operating at 50% overcapacity.  The Mega Development Project report asserts that “annual flooding causes both damage to homes and infrastructure, and constitutes a significant health risk from floodwaters contaminated by the raw sewage which flows in the drainage network.”

Unfortunately, the infrastructure problems that plague Karachi are not unique.  Growing urban populations across the globe expose the limitations and the finite durability of ever thinly-stretched city infrastructure.  Many existing water pipes, inner-city roads, and sewage systems, often built for the cities of yesteryear and a pre-seven billion inhabitant world, have already surpassed or are approaching their maximum capacities.  Sadly, fixing existing problems tends to be too costly a burden for city and national governments, and cost-cutting maneuvers lead to poorly constructed, short-term solutions.

However, instead of expensively retrofitting infrastructure through piecemeal reconstruction, a modern trend has provided governments a long-term, cost effective way to house expanding populations: New City construction.

Thoroughly engineered, decongested cities allocate resources more efficiently through their fully integrated infrastructure – an indispensable trait that will prove a matter of survival in a sustainable 21^st century.  As efficiency demands increase and technologies speed globalization, master planned cities also add needed economic benefits by defining clear regional roles in the world economy.  Planners, engineers, and architects now design cities specifically to give industries naturally built advantages.

As the world hastily industrializes and urban populations relentlessly grow, the overcrowding problems that infected the dreary, 20^th century rapidly industrializing cities now reach every corner of the globe.  Yet decentralized, new urban systems help mitigate population growth to rates manageable enough for cities to address infrastructure demands.  New cities can alleviate these increasing pressures while joining populations to an international, globalized world economy.

Keep reading »

City-Scale Development: A Look into How New Cities Ease the Infrastructure Burdens of the 21st Century

Haiti Rural Mapping Initiative

Click the Picture to Enlarge or Visit the Site Directly

This website previews one part of the "World Changing" work the International Development Interest Group (IDIG) is currently performing in Haiti with Architecture for Humanity.  Also note the list of "Additional Consultants!"

Haiti Rural Mapping Initiative

The Atlas of Economic Complexity

As complex as it looks.
(Click the graphic to enlarge or here for a key that explains each sector.)

The recently published the Atlas of Economic Complexity provides a new way to assess and predict future economic growth.  Existing measures, like GDP and PPP, ignore the true intricacies of entire economies and fail to capture essential externalities.  The Index of Economic Complexity on the other hand accounts for a wider understanding of the capitalist system by acknowledging that markets are aggregates of networks of millions of highly specialized individuals.  

Although I personally have yet to explore the specific formulas used to calculate the Index of Economic Complexity (they're as complex as the name suggests), the idea behind the new measure sounds extremely intriguing.  On first glance, the Atlas of Economic Complexity appears to be a Moneyball revolution, using advanced statistical data to extract value in areas where status quo measures are long overdue for an modernizing overhaul.

Some quotes:

"The wealth of nations is driven by productive knowledge," writes Ricardo Hausmann, one of the Atlas of Economic Complexity report's primary authors. "Individuals are limited in the things they can effectively know and use in production so the only way a society can hold more knowledge is by distributing different chunks of knowledge to different people. To use the knowledge, these chunks need to be re-aggregated by connecting people through organizations and markets...In fact, [the Index of Economic Complexity] beats measures of competitiveness such as the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index by a factor of 10 in predicting growth for the following decade. It also beats by similar margins measures of human capital and governance."

The Economist describes the Atlas's ability to explain previously inexplicable trends.  "Investment in education is a weaker predictor of economic growth than the complexity measure. The comparison of Ghana, which had invested heavily in education, and Thailand which hasn't, is interesting. Thailand does well in the complexity index and Ghana doesn't. Thailand 'has moved from producing jute and sugar to becoming a major manufacturing center.' Ghana hasn't....The research makes clear that a country can only shift into new more technical products and services along a ladder of existing products through the evolution its productive knowledge in a virtuous circle."

The Atlas of Economic Complexity

Cities on the Sea

Source: Seasteading.org

“Taxation without representation” still rings true for many libertarians.  The possibility to break off from a mother country to create an autonomous self-governing city-state is a possibility that is gaining traction and funds from wealthy backers.  Since governments lay claim to all land across the globe, wealthy libertarians, like Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, and Patri Friedman, the grandson of Milton Friedman, assembled a think-tank, the Seasteading Institute, to study the feasibility of creating a floating, off-shore city that remains out of reach of national governments.  “Our Mission,” writes the Institute on their website, “to further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems."

Source: Seasteading.org

The Seasteading Institute explores cruise-ship style offices, apartments, and retail centers, which unfortunately cannot withstand the storms of the high seas.  Oilrigs provide other platforms, but can cause seasickness when they rock with waves.  And cities built above small island foundations raise problems with international law, as these would fall within the grey area of countries’ territorial waters (12 miles offshore) and their exclusive economic zones (200 miles offshore).

A futuristic shipyard in outer space
Source: OnRPG.com

While libertarians are quickly written off as fanatics who wish for the yesteryears of 1776 colonial rebellion, those who dream of cities in space are accepted by society as sci-fi futurists – yet the two concepts are extremely similar.  A leading presidential candidate has even suggested the building of "a massive new program to build a permanent lunar colony to exploit the Moon's resources."  Ocean city designs would most likely draw ideas of self-sustaining agriculture and energy uses from prior outer space living competitions.  Likewise, future space cities would adopt successes and note failures of condensed sea living.  While the libertarian city on the sea dream attempts to break barriers to free market concepts (like the uninterrupted movement of labor that could be lubricated with the elimination of visa or immigration laws), those idealists ignore the more cost effective existing terrestrial zones that already cater to libertarian freedoms.

Source: The Economist

Pushing political views aside and looking at cities on the sea from the Seasteading Institute’s point of view as a creative exercise, these think tanks get funding to conceptualize what it would take to build a new country from scratch in the modern era.  They also get to explore designs of how to feed and sustain populations disconnected from traditional terrestrial living.  While floating metropolises may be only slightly more realistic at this point than building a real life Death Star in space, ocean-based cities rethink traditional models of urban living.  At the very least, the Seasteading Institute’s studies will demonstrate ways to integrate sustainability techniques with underlying urban infrastructure.

For more on Seasteading and floating communities, read The Economist's Seasteading: Cities on the Ocean.

Cities on the Sea

"Most of the [new city Songdo] will be wired with digital synapses—from the trunk lines running beneath the streets to the filaments branching through the walls and fixtures. To what end? [Songdo's developer] Stan Gale and his partners at Cisco Systems aren’t sure, but imagine if a city operated like an iPhone—and they could sell apps for everyday life..." — Greg Lindsay, City-in-a-Box 11/26/2011

Edward Glaeser: Triumph of the City

Edward Glaeser is an urban economist and bestselling author of Triumph of the City.  A proponent of high density city living, Glaeser's insight into the rise and fall of cities, from Boston to the Rust Belt, offers an amazingly well written look at cities and their historical/economic importance.  In his interview with The Economist, Glaeser compares Detroit in the early 1900's to today's Silicon Valley.  For anyone even curious about how cities work or why Detroit struggles while Bangalore flourishes, read Glaeser's masterpiece, Triumph of the City.

Edward Glaeser: Triumph of the City

Population Growth and Development

To further delve into humanity's 7 billion landmark reached last week, I feel I didn't sufficiently explain the demographic transition humanity follows.  As countries develop, death rates drop.  With advances in medical technology and sanitation, people live longer.  High birth rates then take about a generation to fall more in line with death rates.  Only then do populations reach slower, stabilized growth levels.

This demographic shift explains the Earth's 7 billion, via worldwide growth and development.  The big spike in population growth over the past 150 years represents the large portion of humanity that has already experienced declining death rates.  That alone is pretty impressive!  But this unsustainable level of rapid growth will soon slow.  Although humanity exponentially jumped 6 billion people since 1800, the population should only expand 3 billion more by 2100.  Water shortages and environmental impacts aside, it is pretty impressive that our food systems, our political systems, etc. are so advanced that we can provide for this many people.  We can grow enough food and distribute that food to 7 billion people.  Our systems surely are not perfect, but, if you consider that for most of history everyone who was not nobility was an impoverished peasant, we've definitely made some progress.  I'm proud to be part of the world of 7 billion!

Population Growth and Development

Happy 7 Billion Day!

On Halloween, what’s scarier than Thriller-like zombies, Jack Sparrow pirates, or scalpel carrying nurses?  In 2011, October 31^st also marks the symbolic day in which the world’s population reaches 7 billion.

Amazingly, the world can sustain such large populations.  With technological advances in food production, medicine, and sanitation, humanity today can support over 7 billion lives.  Population growth may slow, but by the turn of the next century, the Earth will already be crowded with over 10 billion people (the UN estimates that people will reach the 10 billion landmark even sooner in 2083). 

While obvious concerns of overpopulation, increased inequality, and environmental impacts accompany any mention of population growth, the shear feat of man’s growth remains remarkable.  People should celebrate that, in itself, 7 billion represents enough food and resources to keep people alive and reproducing at historically unprecedented levels. 

7 billion is humanitarian.  7 billion is agricultural, technological, medical, economic, political, social progress.  7 billion is an incredible milestone to reach.  The more complex our systems become, the more people humanity can sustain.  Diminishing the negative effects (poverty, climate change, etc.) should be the goal of today’s generation.  But by no means should 7 billion symbolize the fall of mankind.  7 billion is a reason to celebrate!  Ignoring the responsibilities that accompany such large population growth is the sin.

For more on the world's population, check out National Geographic's special series on The 7 Billion.

Happy 7 Billion Day!

Desalinizing Ocean Water

As water increasingly becomes a scarce resource, China takes progressive measures to ensure its future dominance in the clean water sector.  Government financed infrastructure, like the North-South Water Diversion Project that aims to reroute the Yangtze River, prove excessively costly and ultimately unsustainable.  In response, the Chinese government has committed to theproduction of 800 million gallons a day of desalinized ocean water by the year 2020.  

Haihe River, Tianjin

China already tests its first filtration systems by pumping 10,000 tons of desalinized water a day into Beijing’s pipes.  At this point, desalinized water costs 8 yuan per cubic meter to produce, while water on the open market sells for 5 yuan.  But in some of China’s largest cities, like Tianjin where the first desalination plant is located, water already sells at a premium and prices are expected to rise 63% over the next 20 years in the country. 

The Desalination Process
(Click to Enlarge)

The industry plans to refine membrane filtration technologies until they become economically viable.  With tax-breaks, low interest loans, and an initial investment of $4 billion in a new desalination plant, China willingly accepts upfront losses in its quest to dominate the industry with 90% market power by 2020.  Future investments could reach another $31 billion.  As a result, the red nation already attracts the preeminent desalination firms in the world to its soil -- and not just for manufacturing; foreign R&D operations have already reestablishing their home bases.

"The [first desalination] plant is not profitable at present," recognizes Guo Qigang, general manager of China's operational desalination plant in Tianjin.  "But as the economy develops, its value will increase.  Desalination provides value for society."

Desalinizing Ocean Water

Trade Wars: Solar Power Subsidies

Americans who rarely think about the adverse effects of free-trade agreements and who blindly promote them in the quest for “efficiency” can finally feel the pain these pacts inflict on the less dominant power.  The obvious outsourcing and flight of labor intensive jobs are standard during free-trade transitions.  But Americans can now also understand the darker side of uneven banking practices and of markets flooded with foreign subsidized production.  Yesterday’s filing of a broad trade case against China for subsidizing solar power manufacturers best exemplifies years of mounting karma.

President Obama speaks at Solyndra on May 26th, 2010.

In a news conference earlier this month, President Obama addressed issues with the solar power industry.  “Even if the technology was developed in the United States,” the President said, “they end up going to China because the Chinese government will say, ‘We’re going to help you get started, we’ll help you scale up, we’ll give you low-interest loans or no-interest loans, we will give siting, we will do whatever it takes for you to get started here.’”  Through what equates to a subsidy with no-interest loans, China props up its domestic solar power industry, creating imbalances that give Chinese industries an edge against competition.  But America does this all the time. 

Although it provided the solar power company Solyndra with a $535 million federal loan guarantee and a $25million state tax break, the US is losing at its own game, as Solyndra couldn’t compete and filed for bankruptcy over the summer.  When the US proposes free-trade agreements (like those passed with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama last week), the one-sided treaties allow for American farmers to flood foreign markets with US subsidized food.  Even the most efficient foreign farmers could never compete with the $5 billion a year US Farm Bill.  In another recent and visible example, Japan didn’t speak up when the Detroit auto industry effectively received the same loans under TARP.  In essence, Chinese solar power subsidies just sound like America getting a dose of its own medicine. 

As US policy makers simultaneously pass new free-trade agreements with the developing world and negotiate new subsidies for farmers at home, they attack currency manipulation and subsidizing bank practices in China.  American politicians fail to see the situation’s irony.  If the US fights to equalize trade practices with China, will developing nations follow America’s example and fight back against US subsidies?




Here's a NYTimes followup to yesterday's post: Solar Trade Case May Backfire on US Firms

Trade Wars: Solar Power Subsidies

"While small business suffered terribly during the Great Depression, big corporations did well. When large companies needed to lay off workers to maintain profitability, they did so ruthlessly. Bursts of economic growth, however, were rarely accompanied by an increase in employment. Why? Because new technology allowed companies to increase productivity at the expense of workers." -- Joe Nocera, The 1930s Sure Sound Familiar (10/14/2011)