No finagling at the top alone will restore the American economy. 75 percent of the economy is driven by the spending of ordinary consumers and they are frightened. Call it PTS and it will not be cured easily. The distribution of free booze and Prozac will jerk start spending again. That is the only quick fix that is possible.
SPONSORED BY:
We Ask: When Will the Pain Go Away?
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
SPONSORED BY
That's why we're such forceful advocates of cellulosic, non-food- based ethanol, which, with greater government and industry support, could substantially reduce the world's dependence on petroleum, and relatively quickly.
Could the Internet help us out of this mess?
Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google
Hundreds of millions of users, billions of searches, tens of billions of Web pages—numbers so large and intangible make it hard to appreciate the scale of the Web and its viral hyper- connectedness. Visiting a cybercafé in Switzerland in 1999, I glimpsed something on another customer's screen—a little Web site my friends and I were building, Google. We had never marketed Google, yet it was already spanning the globe. Now more than half of Google's searches and revenue come from outside the United States. If one country has several quarters of weak economic performance, our business remains resilient—buoyed by the economic strength and search activity elsewhere. Internet technology means more customers from more places, which allows us to benefit from the expanding and diverse economies of the world. We see search queries from everywhere—Antarctica included.
The reach and growth of the Internet magnify the notion that the world's economies are increasingly decoupling from any one nation's fortune. But that doesn't mean the world is becoming more disconnected. On the contrary—the Internet brings a new connection through access to information, better communication tools and shared intellectual understanding.
Today
'
s pain may change behavior for the good
Steve Case, cofounder of AOL and chairman of Revolution LLC
There's good news and there's bad news. I'll start with the bad and the most obvious. Rising oil prices are having a significant impact on our economy. Not only are consumers feeling pain at the pump, but we have hit the tipping point where that pain spreads well beyond, hitting consumers hard at virtually every turn. From the basics like food and clothing, to air travel and family vacations, it is clear that oil prices are going to continue to take their toll for the foreseeable future.
But the good news is, with that pain, I believe we will ultimately experience long-term gain. We see it in the news almost every day: high oil prices are forcing consumer behavioral changes. With tighter family budgets, consumers are wasting less. Also, people are conserving energy through alternative transportation—cycling, carpooling, car-sharing—and in their homes, for example, by turning off unneeded lights. Instead of buying food in our grocery stores that's been shipped for thousands of miles, people are shopping at their farmers markets to buy locally grown food.
Also, there is a push by the public and private sectors to accelerate investments in alternative energies. With many claiming we have reached our peak oil production and some oil geologists believing that 90 percent of the world's oilfields have been tapped, it's clear that alternative energy is no longer a fringe concept. It is part of our future.
Discuss