Most of my Boomer contemporaries are living in a world today that we could not have imagined when we graduated from high school in the late 1960’s. It was obvious to my peers and to me as we were coming of age that the Norman Rockwell homogenous WASPish world of America in the 1950’s was not an accurate portrayal of what America had historically been and what America was at that time. The social – political – economic conflicts within American society that were reflected in the Civil Rights Movement throughout the 1960’s and that were reflected in the Anti-War Movement in the late 1960’s would precipitate an unforeseeable period of fundamental transformation throughout the fabric of American society.
Quite literally, fast forward forty five years since the end of the 1960’s. The American WASP male oligarchy of the Nineteenth Century and of the first half of the Twentieth Century has by the early Twenty First Century been largely out competed by a diverse new group of intellectual leaders, business leaders and political leaders. Appropriately, the new American elite is now more of a reflection of our new emerging global economy and our new emerging global society.
The revolutionary group of technologies associated with the Internet; i.e. computer technology, the digitization of almost any conceivable stimulus and the current comprehensive global communication infrastructure have together in the past twenty years transformed everyday life for literally several billion people currently living on our planet. Alvin Toffler could not have possibly imagined the complete reshaping of global human society that has occurred in the past thirty years when he wrote “Future Shock” in the late 1960’s.
This political economy blog is a reflection of the fascination that I have had with international political economy since I was a foreign exchange student living in Cali, Colombia in 1968. The widespread availability of authoritative information and commentary related to political economy on the Internet has given me an unanticipated opportunity to review and share some of that research and commentary on this blog. It is still beyond my comprehension that for the price of a basic laptop computer, for the nominal cost of a broadband Internet connection and for the negligible cost of registering an Internet domain, I can publish articles and commentary on the World Wide Web that will be readily accessible to anyone anywhere in the world who has a basic computer or smart phone and an Internet connection.
Welcome to our Brave New World.