How financial engineering has replaced industrial engineering SS: What is the role of technology in all this?
The “Progressive Century” was inaugurated by breakthroughs in energy, electricity and then nuclear power, radio, air travel, medical cures and so forth. How much has actual technology been responsible for “real” wealth creation as opposed to bubble financing? MH: Higher prices for houses and stock in large corporations look like a way to build up wealth without having any tangible cost associated with it. This absence of what the classical economists defined as value–ultimately the cost of supplying labor effort–has changed the popular meaning of “wealth” to mean financial market value, not industrial capital measured in terms of its productive power. In this sense today’s anti-government economics runs against what economists, politicians and most people considered to be industrial progress a century ago. SS: Given all the we know about the corporate crime and deregulation behind bubble of the ’90s, why is no one talking about the old-fashioned solutions like those types of regulati
