re: #3 Naso Tang

Did you ever hear the phrase ‘As GM goes, so goes the nation’? That used to be the motto of the US economy. If you haven’t heard it, it’s because a significant shift occurred with the invention of the personal computer, causing virtually all of the US economy to retool. The leaders of this new industrial revolution? Microsoft and Apple, and the entire Silicon Valley culture.

Significant outsourcing began to occur prior to the year 2000, when many thought there would be a complete computer collapse, and therefore economic collapse, at the very beginning of the year 2000, when it was thought that the shift in date would set all computers to the year zero and thereby screw up all stored data. There was so much work to be done that companies began to hire programmers from around the world for this task. For companies in other nations, it became a simple matter of upselling their customers in the US.

The overall point, though, is that innovation does create new industries and is the engine of growing economies. This has been true throughout history.