Now that Barack Obama has been re-elected US president, every fantastic campaign promise will collide with the reality of the global economy. Mitt Romney made different promises but would have faced the same dead end. Although the election appeared to offer a choice of futures, both candidates were silent about the bright future gone missing: the age of scientific ingenuity we once expected to solve our problems.
During the past 40 years the world has willingly retreated from a culture of risk and exploration towards one of safety and regulation. We have discarded a century of can-do ambition built on rapid advances in technology and replaced it with a cautiousness far too satisfied with incremental improvements.
The 2008 crisis lingers. But its main cause goes back more than three decades to the depressed rate of technological progress since the 1970s. If we want to escape not just today’s crisis but the whole post-1970 era of bubbles, busts and wage stagnation, our only option is to accelerate technological innovation.