THE ARGUMENT
The Information Age began to transform daily life toward the end of the twentieth century. But the technologies that produced the personal computer and the World Wide Web originated in the mid-twentieth century.
Most of the transformative technologies of the third industrial revolution were products of research backed by the US government. R&D funded by the military, during World War II and the early Cold War, led to nuclear energy, computers, and the Internet.
Combined with a new global infrastructure based on container ships, cargo jets, and satellite communications, computer technology made possible the emergence of global corporations engaged in production in many countries and several continents. The first attempt at an information-age global economy, however, was profoundly flawed. China, Japan, Germany, and other export-oriented nations sought to maintain permanent manufacturing trade surpluses, while American consumers, supplementing stagnant wages with unsustainable levels of debt, provided the engine of growth for the world economy. Mediated by an ever more reckless financial industry and swollen by the flow of the gains from growth to the gambling few rather than the consuming many, global imbalances built up as they had in the 1920s until the world economy crashed in 2008.