I am not sure I agree with the rosy view of the paternalistic corporation of the 70s and 80s. But the insight here is what technology business advances have done for the negative. A somewhat rude awakening perhaps for those making out like bandits but always thought they were 'doing no evil' and allowing the world to 'network' for good.
Larry Summers Op Ed from a few years ago...Three ways to combat rising inequality - The Washington Post: "The extent of the change in the income distribution is such that it is no longer true that the overall growth rate of the economy is the principal determinant of middle-class income growth — how the growth pie is distributed is at least equally important."
Stimulating perspective through the reality of two janitors - Kodak in the 80s and Apple today...To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now - The New York Times: "Yet the biggest difference between their two experiences is in the opportunities they created. A manager learned that Ms. Evans was taking computer classes while she was working as a janitor and asked her to teach some other employees how to use spreadsheet software to track inventory. When she eventually finished her college degree in 1987, she was promoted to a professional-track job in information technology.
Less than a decade later, Ms. Evans was chief technology officer of the whole company, and she has had a long career since as a senior executive at other top companies. Ms. Ramos sees the only advancement possibility as becoming a team leader keeping tabs on a few other janitors, which pays an extra 50 cents an hour.
They both spent a lot of time cleaning floors. The difference is, for Ms. Ramos, that work is also a ceiling."
Niall Ferguson on why Zuck's a bit too idealistic on the good his billions have really done for the world...
The False Prophecy of Hyperconnection: Surviving the Networked Age: "Like John Lennon’s “Imagine,” utopian visions of a networked world are intuitively appealing....Yet this vision, of a single global community as the pot of gold at the end of the arc of history, is at odds with everything we know about how social networks work....Long before the founding of Facebook, however, scholars had already conducted a great deal of research into how smaller and slower social networks operate. What they found gives little ground for optimism about how a fully networked world would function."
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