On Mar 12, 2007, at 4:58 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> If the early oil and auto businesses were not characterized by big
> investment, that is probably in large part because there was still a
> lot of competition and oligopolistic consolidation had yet to take
> place.
You've been hanging around MR too long! Competition is not dead. Firms are still born, and others die; technologies are introduced, and some succeed, and some fail.
> Moreover, we need to face up to the fact that the question of oil vs.
> environmentally sounder energy sources is not a technological question
> but a political one.
Well yeah, but you never know what the Wozniak & Jobs of energy could come up with.
It struck me recently that Tom Frank's critique of the business appropriation of language like "revolutionary" and "extreme" misses the point that many of the new generation of capitalists that came on the scene in the 1980s were out to shake up the old, Galbrathian New Industrial State, that regime of comfortable mediocrity run by geeks and suits. Every word that Marx wrote in the Manifesto about the revolutionary potential of capitalism is still true. For the sake of humanity and our natural home, I'd prefer a rationally planned regime of public R&D and investment, but it would be very wrong to underestimate the innovative power of capitalism.
Oh, and the Chinese are pretty committed to new forms of energy. Who knows what might come out of that?
Doug