The big question is: Who’s profiting? Innovations in Silicon Valley trigger mass layoffs elsewhere. Just take webshops like Amazon. The emergence of online sellers led to the loss of millions of jobs in retail. The British economist Alfred Marshall already noted this dynamic back in the late nineteenth century: The smaller the world gets, the fewer the number of winners. In his own day, Marshall observed a shrinking oligopoly on the production of grand pianos. With each new road that was paved and each new canal that was dug, the costs of transport dropped another notch, making it increasingly
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