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By Root 1697 0

benefits such as health care or maternity pay, for training the workforce—and also, for that matter, for collecting statistics. They were hierarchical, and many workers would expect to spend years working their way up a single organization. As already pointed out, the new information and communication technologies have changed the optimal shape of organizations, and this has been reflected in more then twenty years’ worth of corporate restructuring. Both the boundaries of businesses and their internal structure have changed. The wider social restructuring has yet to occur.

It will. People are using the access to information they’ve gained. For example, in the decade to 2009, the proportion of U.S. households with a broadband connection rose to 63 percent, ten times the proportion in 2000; 247 billion e-mails a day were being sent, compared with 12 billion in 2000. The number of pages indexed by Google rose from a billion to over a trillion; and the number of daily searches from 10 million to an estimated 300 million. The number of Wikipedia entries (in English) climbed from 20,000 in 2001 to 3.1 million in 2009. And with three hundred dollars, the amount of hard disk space someone could buy rose from 30 gigabytes to 2,000 gigabytes (2 terabytes) in 2009.21 The United States has been at the forefront of the spread of access to the digital and online world, but the trend has been similarly dramatic in other OECD countries.

So individual citizens now swim in an ocean of information and access to communications, which they eagerly use. A number of authors such as Clay Shirky or Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom have written in some detail about what the implications of this distributed access to information and scope for decentralized coordination might mean in terms of organizations.22 It’s probably too early to be confident about any specific predictions, and one should be cautious about excessive techno-optimism, but nevertheless the lesson of previous waves of innovation in history is that institutions and society will be reshaped by new technologies. The incredible spread of access to information and communications today makes institutional innovation inevitable.

WHAT NEXT?

One of the contributions I hope this book makes to public debate about our economic future is to bring together in one framework of analysis several challenges. Each is serious enough in itself, but looking at them together makes it clear that the way the advanced economies have developed in the past generation cannot and will not continue. Looking at the problem as a whole, it is apparent that the way we individually and collectively respond to various challenges will change; and so the question to ask is how we can manage the change for the best, in order to avert the distress and disruption—perhaps even catastrophe—that would result from ignoring the need.

Managing change as a society, or indeed as a closely linked group of societies, will only happen if there is a shared analysis. The measurement questions I summarized earlier should be addressed urgently. But the failure of the Copenhagen climate change talks demonstrates clearly that even when there’s ample statistical evidence of a problem, it can be too difficult to get the political consensus or momentum necessary. Likewise the inability of politicians to get a grip on the financial industry. Our existing political structures are not working well; neither elected politicians nor officials are easily able to implement any “difficult” policies. There are several reasons for this dysfunctionality, including the existence of some underlying social fractures that make consensus difficult to attain. One important reason is that the hierarchical governance structures we’ve inherited from the past are not appropriate or effective any longer.

Political leaders themselves recognize the need to find innovative ways of engaging with citizens, and are in various ways in various countries introducing some experimentation. However, it’s up to us to engage with these efforts or to try other experiments