I was flabbergasted by the derision with which the call from the president to imagine a country where bullet trains pass through our cities was met after his state of the nation address. By contrast, there is broad consensus that by auctioning spectrum and reducing the cost of data, there would be a fillip to our economy. As a country, is our imagination bounded by our current morass?
In the 1800s, 90% of the US workforce was employed in farming. The advent of the Ford Model T allowed for mass employment on the factory floor; the proportion employed in farming dropped to 30% in the 1930s. Currently, only 2% of the US population work on farms and yet the level of productivity is such that the growing population can feed itself. And even in farming, technology is leading to disruptions, from machinery equipped with software that will find the best place to sow seeds to aerial imagery from drones helping farmers to identify tracts of land that have not been adequately irrigated....
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