My guest today is Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University. He focuses on technological progress, and how it affects growth. From Mokyr’s perspective, we haven’t seen anything yet. He’s not trying to predict what will happen next; he’s just confident and ready that big things will continue to happen.

The topic is technology.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

• Define technology
• The notion of playing God with technology
• How technology and economic growth are intertwined
• Why screwing up is part of technology
• The acceleration of technology
• New ways of measuring growth
• Anesthesia and antibiotics as technologies and imagining new technologies as revolutionary as them
• Moving from a wheat and steel economy into an information economy
• The factory, the separation between firm and household, and the Industrial Revolution
• The death of distance
• Why technology is often not reflected in the GDP
• Solving the language barrier through technology
• Why the global acceptance of the English language is driven by technology
• Why innovation isn’t natural to us
• The declining respect of the writings of previous generations
• Why the median age will continue to increase
• Why we are moving into a mass-customization society
• Changes in material science
• The best way to think about the future

Jump in!

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I’m MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I’m proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show.

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