Even though the New Year started with the high hopes, there are few questions which still need answers. In the United States, incoming President Joe Biden’s administration has raised great expectations if bot for all, at least for the half of the country’s electorate. But the pertinent questions are revolving in the back for a while now, like whether the governments should run massively higher debt levels? Or monetary policies being at the service of the fiscal policy. What would be future of globalization? Can technology innovations actually reform the economic games? It has become important to find answers to these questions. Marco Annunziata, Co-Founder, Annunziata + Desai Advisors, shared some insights regarding the technological aspects in the economic drive.
2020 is providing a really hard reality check on the bounds of much-hyped novelties. The robots who are allegedly stealing all the jobs could not prevent a enormous recession when laborers had to stay home to avoid the infection; artificial intelligence (AI) was hypothetically, to open the age of modified medicine and cure inveterate diseases but when COVID-19 hit, we were left to somewhere to stay, in place as we did to fight the outbreak in the 14th century. Techno-pessimists, such as Northwestern’s economist Robert Gordon, who debated that modern tools are not as radical and growth-enhancing as those of the novel engineering revolution appear to be correct. And until now, this mortifying reality check could be precisely is what we need to launch a new upsurge of innovation efforts, more absorbed and more prolific.
Corporations now have a much greater consciousness of their susceptibilities and the areas where they most immediately need to recover the efficiency, flexibility and resilience. They have seen up close where new skills have been able to bring about and where they have tumbled undersized. With their lowest positions impacted by the recession and great insecurity over the future speed of demand retrieval, they feel a much more persistent need to boost effectiveness and improve the boundaries. That’s why across the industries, we are seeing the business leaders being much more convinced about the need to push ahead with revolution, especially digital-industrial revolutions.
Besides, 2020 also displayed that humans will remain critical and essential in the workplace, even as innovation hastens. At a very elementary level, businesses have seen what happens when they have to make do without humans: everything just halts. Corporate leaders have also developed more keenness and are being aware of the need to upgrade their skills of their employees as new technologies are put into abode. And they have been struggling with experimenting with much more flexible work preparations which, going forward, could help recover labor-market access to people in a variability of personal circumstances.
Over and done with all of this, 2020 set the phase for what could be a new stage of revolution: more attentive and closely associated to adoption and implementation in the economic system, and complemented by exaggerated efforts to boost human capital. This revolution boom will be diffused, boosted by the investigations and partnerships of many companies, both big and small. The US has a natural benefit on this front and could lead the next generation of digital-industrial technologies and business models. This kind of novelty unfolds best in a business-friendly, lightly structured environment with minimal alterations and pushes to the division of financial capital. If the Joe Biden Administration rushes actively into a brave new world of more guidelines, higher taxes and more far-reaching government interference, investment and innovation will most certainly agonize, and the long-term growth will be dropped. This, in turn, would mark the higher debt level as more unsafe and slow the upgrading in the living standards through the income supply.
Bottom line:The year 2021 will hopefully bring us closer to the defeat of COVID-19 and a return ticket to our normal life. But we should already be looking further than the public-health emergency and start concentrating on the hard questions that will shape our economic destiny for a long time to come.
