Mark P. Mills: Get Ready for the Roaring 2020s!

Pessimism is everywhere these days, with a whopping 76 percent of Americans telling Gallup they are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. Some of that’s understandable: COVID-19 has killed 1.1 million Americans, there’s a major land war going on in Europe, the stock market has tanked, and the political scene is filled with fakers and liars whose grasp on reality seems tentative at best.

But Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an engineering faculty fellow at Northwestern University, makes a compelling case for optimism in The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s. Increasingly, microprocessors, materials, and machines are being tied together through cloud computing to deliver startling, steady, and mostly underappreciated gains that are vastly improving all of our lives.

The example of the iPhone, which debuted in 2007 and radically changed how we live, illustrates Mills’ point. It basically utilized existing technologies but tied them together in novel ways. He says the same sorts of breakthroughs are happening all around us, creating innovation that is disruptive in the short term but ultimately positive, if we’ll finally let go of centuries-old anxiety about change.

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