PART V

A NEW ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.

Thomas Paine
The American Crisis, 1776

Since the New Deal and the 1930’s there has been a revolutionary development in the technology of industry and in the fiscal policy and social doctrine of governments. The assumption of reformers from Theodore Roosevelt through Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt was that the poor could be raised up only by a redistribution of wealth. The basic assumption of the pre-war reformers is being dissolved. We have come into an era when the class struggle, as Marx described it a hundred years ago, has been overtaken by events.

Walter Lippmann, 1964

The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought.

J. C. R. Licklider, 1960