Deja Vu

Recent Interpretations

In his 1999 book Business @ the Speed of Thought, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates observes:

"Previous economic eras were marked by long periods of stability followed by short periods of industry-wrenching change. Evolutionists would call this phenomenon punctuated equilibrium. Today the forces of digital information are creating a business environment of constant change. Evolutionists would call this punctuated chaos-constant upheaval marked by brief respites. The pace of changes sometimes unsettling."

The theme of a new pace of change also was addressed in science writer James Gleick's 1999 The Acceleration of Just About Everything. Barbara Ehrenreich, reviewing the book in the September 12, 1999 New York Times Book Review, questions the healthiness of the trend:

"Against all expectations, the collective brain that emerges from our ever richer connectedness is turning out to be kind of dumb."

"The economy and society of the 1990s and at least the first decades of the twenty-first century is a superindustrial society. If changes associated with aging of the population do not obliterate its features it could characterize developments for far longer. By superindustrial society I mean a high-powered environment in which the basic features of the Industrial Revolution are extended for a long time. They are extended by two developments -- more highly automated factories and modernization of service industries. New levels of sophistication are reached in technology, capital, skills and management. Complex computer and communications linkages, application of intelligent systems and other advances in technology are in widespread use. They are extended to many other parts of the world. There is rapid growth in the business services and in services which deal with personal business -- financial, medical, communications, etc. This is in marked contrast to the emphasis on leisure in notions of post-industrial society."

Irving Leveson, American Challenges: Business and Government in the World of the 1990s, New York: Prater Publishers, 1991, pp.47-48.

Miscellany

"In just one year before in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Adm. William Crowe, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had proposed eliminating the Persian Gulf from U.S. military planning on the grounds that the Soviet threat to the region had gone away. In the end, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney and Gen. Colin Powell overruled the Joint Staff and directed the military to begin planning instead for an Iraqi threat to the Arabian Peninsula. Yet no one expected such a threat to materialize as quickly as it did."

Paul Wolfowitz, "A Bomber for Uncertain Times," The Wall Street Journal (June 12, 1995), p.A12.

"Among the most profound business changes that I see occurring now and in the decade to come is a dramatic repositioning of companies in the marketplace. Innovative companies are using the competitive edge that the information technologies provide to create new lines of business, enter new markets, expand their access to existing markets and create new value-added services that create customer loyalty. They are doing all this in a market that is itself changing because of the technologies that are being introduced."

William G. McGowan, Chairman and founder, MCI Communications Corporation, "Information Age Technology--The Competitive Advantage," Views From the Top, Jerome Rosow, ed., New York: Facts On File Publications, 1985, p.134.

"Over a decade ago we began an era of quantum jumps in our basic knowledge of the biosciences. The expansion of that basic knowledge is still proceeding at an extremely rapid pace. It will have innumerable practical consequences, some of which are now appearing and many of which will emerge during the next century."

William E. Bonnet, futurist, in 1979 in "Two Promising Technologies: the Biosciences and Information Sciences," Working in the Twenty-First Century, edited by C. Stewart Sheppard and Donald C. Carrol, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1980.

"I have always thought that if in the lamentable era of the "New Economics," culminating in 1929, even in the presence of dizzily spiraling prices, we had all continuously repeated "two and two still make four" much of the evil might have been averted."

Bernard Baruch, in the introduction to the 1932 edition of Mackay's classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

"The free-trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonisms of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, that I vote in favor of free-trade."

Karl Marx, Brussels, 1848

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

Mark Twain