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One group of winners were the investors, entrepreneurs, and high-skilled laborers that congregated around fast-growing markets and new inventions. Another class of winners were the more than 1 billion people who moved from poverty into the middle class in developing countries because their relatively low-cost labor was an advantage once their countries opened up and became part of a global economy. The losers were people who lived in high-cost labor markets like the United States and Europe whose skills could not keep up with the pace of technological change and globalizing markets.
Unlike the previous wave of digital-led globalization and innovation, which drew enormous numbers of people out of poverty in low-cost labor markets, the next wave will challenge middle classes across the globe, threatening to return many to poverty. The previous wave saw entire countries and societies lifted up economically. The next wave will take frontier economies and bring them into the economic mainstream while challenging the middle classes in the most developed economies.
one of the curious conundrums of globalization: exposure creates not only opportunity but competition, and it can make us question and eventually lose our standing in the world.
Our most valued commodities have gone from salt and sugar to chemicals and fuels to data and services.
Rapid progress often comes with greater instability.
Together these developments may bring new opportunities, but they will also increase the ability of bad actors to cause systemic damage to the international economy.
Whereas land was the raw material of the agricultural age and iron was the raw material of the industrial age, data is the raw material of the information age. The Internet has become an ocean of jumbled, chaotic information, but now there is a way to connect this information and draw actionable business intelligence from it. Big data is transitioning from a tool primarily for targeted advertising to an instrument with profound applications for diverse corporate sectors and for addressing chronic social problems.
