Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Capitalism, Hijacked by Finance?

I stumbled on this 25 minute video recorded last year in South Africa. Clayton Christensen discusses how the cycle of innovation may have been interrupted, contributing to jobless recoveries.

In my opinion, add this analysis to those of Piketty's Capital in 21st Century and Brynjolfsson & McAfee's Second Machine Age when trying to understand the issues we face with employment and inequality.

I guess one overly-simplistic takeaway could be: you get what you measure, so be careful what you measure. More importantly, this suggests, as other analysis seems to as well, that capitalism has been hijacked by finance (and financiers, I suppose) resulting in sub-optimal outcomes, unless you're in finance. The role of capitalism in society is vitally important, and we need to find analysis and vocabulary to help us make policy and political decisions that make sure capitalism is generative, not extractive.