DRAFT: The Second Coming of Capitalism

So I read two interesting economics books recently.  The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee and the now-so-famous-it's-in-famous Capital in the 21st Century, by socialism's newest bad boy Thomas Piketty.  Unless you've been living under a rock for the last six months, I'll assume that you're as familiar with the latter as the rest of the Twitterati.  The former, while listed by Amazon as a best-seller, seems to have gotten less attention and perhaps requires some introduction.  

Brynjolfsson and McAfee are a couple of (only modestly, from the looks of the dust jacket) bearded professor types from MIT.  There's probably some more biographical information at the beginning of this book talk they gave, if you're into that stuff, and the type who prefers the fast and loose shoddiness of the public performance of economics. At any rate, they wrote an interesting book in the techno-optimistic genre, arguing that we are on the cusp of a new machine age, driven by artificial intelligence, that will be as consequential as the first and second industrial revolutions (#1 being basically the steam engine and #2 being electricity, internal combustion, chemicals and everything else, according to Vaclav Smil).  While optimistic, however, the book is not utopian, and they also try to figure out what all this new technology will mean for employment and equality.  You might see the whole thing as an expansion of the could-be-apocryphal exchange between Henry Ford and the head of the UAW:

Ford -- "Look at this great new machine, it replaces 5 workers and never misses a shift.  How are you going to get that thing to pay union dues, eh?" 

Head of UAW -- "Very impressive Mr. Ford.  But how are you going to get it to buy your cars?"

My new write-a-review-of everything-I-read project got a little derailed when I started reading Piketty before I had written something about B. and McA.  But sometimes these little setbacks are just what we need to take a giant step forward.  The books make a natural complement in my mind because they offer related meditations on what we're coming to see is the big question of 21st century capitalism -- what sort of relation will there be between growth and inequality? 

So here goes a joint review of the next 100 years.

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Shit happens.  

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