But, you're right. Look at why nearly every major internet company in the world is American. It's not some happy coincidence. The incentives that Obama and his party are trying so hard to strip away are precisely the reason such amazing wealth creation is possible.

Yeah… it's just a coincidence that share of total income trends just happens to correlate with the two major economic crashes. And to boot just an anomaly that our economy hummed along so well in between when the differences in income share was low.

And then he ends his most recent article with this:

"Admittedly, this is a touchy issue to write about at a time when millions of our fellow citizens are out of work and facing dim prospects for the future."

Thomas F. Cooley

I am surprised he's not arguing the unemployment figure data. Apparently the middle class is doing just fine with ~10% unemployment. Incredulous!

This is an example of a man re-interpreting the data to fit his pre-conceived ideology and nothing more.

Yeah the planners in ivory tower told us that unemployment will cross 8% if the stimulus wasn't passed without giving it much thought. Nothing incredulous about it.

Look at why nearly every major internet company in the world is American. It's not some happy coincidence.

Information technology, unlike all the others, is dependent on the language medium. English, being the most popular lingua-franca of the world, has a natural advantage in this area – which is another reason why Hollywood always had advantages over movie industries of other nations. It is a positive feedback loop. The Information Technology may have also helped further the spread of English as an international language of commerce and travel.

Being a programmer, I can tell you that most of the programming languages developed early on have derived their structure from English language itself – which gives native english speakers an edge over other. It is a strong corollary that further development in software technology would be tilted in favor of English speakers. Another country that has taken huge advantage of this situation is India – with it's education still based in English language, and English being the prefered medium of communication of the upper echelons of Indian society.

There are economic reasons of course. The fact that capital was available to investors through out the 1990s helped this fact. I am sure all that Savings from Japan & China might have helped fund it.

Savings in educated human resources from around the world also helped matters – as far as information techonology goes, the primary skill that a programmer brings to the company is his basic logical, programming and math skills – migration of technology workers in large numbers from India and China to the united states must have definitely helped. Economic liberalization in much of far east and relatively liberalized global trade provided ample boost to the innovations in technology per se.

Being an English speaker is an advantage in learning a programming language, but someone with great problem-solving skills, logic, and creativity will out-program most of the Indians who know the computer languages but not the best way to use them.

I don't believe it is a valid argument to say that we have to look at the cause of the technology mentioned in order to giver proper credit. Following such an idea to its logical end, we would soon be back at the spinning jenny or the cotton gin.

High speed and dependable telecommunications networks, effective communications and data transfer applications and the sheer processing power of modern computers have enabled commerce in ways it was not possible 50 years ago. 300 years ago, trade was limited to the ability to move goods on ships based on predetermined contracts. 100 years ago, goods could be shipped, and prices determined at the point of sale from hundreds of miles away. 50 years ago, trade was determined by the speed that brokers could send orders back and then across the world. Now the limits on trade are determined by instantaneous transmission of contracts and money around the world, covered by automated currency hedging.

I'd suggest that it's not that the technology has somehow directly increased the value of the economy, but that it's enabled an increase in trade, freer trade and lower barriers of entry to trade simultaneously around the world.

I long for a day when these populist jackasses would wake up and realize things are not nearly as gloomy as they claim. Of course, that's probably a little too optimistic.

I love how these butthurt liberals and Democrats react when experts like the economist in the aforementioned article lash out and say "No! It's not true! You're lying to fit your preconceived view", rather than coming to terms with the actual facts. It's so predictable. What's this "Ivory Tower" nonsense that sam grove spouts, anyhow? A person can't disagree with the liberal Democrats' economic agenda without being some kind of stooge for the rich? Come on!

I'm a libertarian, for christ sake! I'm just as anti-big business as anti-government. I care about the individual. The problem is that one party is the party of the rich and the other is the party of the poor. They both put too much emphasis on one class and ignore the other to America's peril.

And consider this, my liberal friends: While you malign CEOs for outsourcing jobs, you forget that if the jobs stayed in America, they would eventually have to go out of business. You know what that means? EVERYONE working for that corporation would lose their jobs! At least with offshoring, some Americans keep jobs.

As a close friend of mine once remarked, there is only ONE reason that jobs are outsourced. They are outsourced because the people that work in them can find more ideal pay, conditions or work elsewhere.

If I was willing to work for a dollar less per hour, my job would not be outsourced. But I'm not willing to. I'm not willing to because I believe my time is worth more than that and I can get an equivalent or better job somewhere else. It has nothing to do with need or ultimately minimum wage. A rational human being who needs 20 dollars per hour will take 18 dollars per hour over 0. There are ultimately ways of getting out of contracts, minimum wage, etc. It boils down to one single thing: choice.

Well, why do you think all those programming languages are English based? Because we invented them all!

This only further illustrates my point. We are able to invent a grossly disproportionate amount of the world's great stuff because we let those inventors reap the rewards for their inventions.

The fact that good programmers may be predominately English is really beside the point. The best Barbie makers in the world undoubtedly live in China and speak Chinese, but the products their building are created in the US. The labor isn't the hard part, the imagination and implementation of that labor is.