Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Can Technology Save the Economy?

Bookmark for when you have 15 uninterrupted minutes.
From MIT's Technology Review:

The U.S. stimulus bill includes tens of billions to support energy and information technologies. It is intended both to create jobs immediately and to set the stage for long-term economic growth. So why are economists and innovation experts so skeptical?




Most audacious, the spending bill does all this with the intention of both stimulating the economy in the immediate future and creating growth in the long term. President Obama and others in his administration have repeatedly connected the stimulus spending with the need to begin creating "green jobs" and building a "clean-energy economy."

The decision to make large energy investments in hopes of realizing both immediate economic benefits and longer-term environmental dividends represents a "massive shift" in government policy, says Robert Pollin, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Pollin published a report last fall arguing that substantial spending on energy technologies would create two million jobs over the next two years. The idea that spending on energy technologies to address global warming could have an immediate economic benefit, he says, "would have been considered preposterous less than two years ago." Yet his study now reads like a blueprint for much of the stimulus bill's energy funding.
