#A Credit card Terminal That Takes Apps Last year Osama Bedier then the head of Google Wallet decided he was on the wrong side of the payments business.
Bedier s new company Poynt has a new kind of credit-card terminal. The sleek-looking $299 touch-screen gadget accepts cards with embedded chips
which will soon be widespread as well as digital payments and can run apps for things like customer loyalty programs and sales analytics.
Poynt unveiled the device on Wednesday and plans to ship it to merchants in early 2015.
Google s digital payment app Google Wallet offers consumers a number of payment-related features including a quick way to pay at stores by tapping a phone that contains a near-field
communication NFC) chip. Although adoption of Google Wallet has been slow NFC technology is gaining in popularity
and that is likely to accelerate with the introduction of a similar system from Apple called Apple Pay (see With Apple Pay Forget Cash Just Pull out Your Phone).
Meanwhile the U s s major credit-card companies are mandating a shift to more secure credit cards that eschew the familiar magnetic strip for a chip that uses a unique string of numbers for each transaction (a standard known as EMV
which stands for Europay Mastercard and Visa for the card companies that first backed the technology.
This change which has occurred already in other parts of the world and aims to staunch the kinds of security breaches that have occurred at major retailers like Target Neiman Marcus
and Home depot means that U s. merchants must upgrade millions of credit-card terminals to accept the new cards by October 2015
Bedier a former Paypal executive who came to Google in 2011 saw an opportunity to switch his focus from the gadgets we can use to make payments to the ones used to handle the transactions:
credit-card terminals and cash registers. No matter how great the value proposition you can t force people to install new technology
Poynt s terminal is dominated by two touch screens that meet at an angle a seven-inch display that a store employee will use to ring up sales
The apex of the device houses a slot for dipping a credit card and there s a built-in receipt printer that will spit out paper from an opening below the customer touch screen.
The Poynt device Bedier says is meant to accept all kinds of payments that may become increasingly popular in the coming years.
It accepts payments via NFC (used by services such as Google Wallet and Apple s new Apple Pay) and QR code.
It includes Bluetooth as well. Bedier showed me how it works during an interview conducted via Skype video.
The Poynt terminal he used said Welcome to Main St. Bakery on the customer screen
and showed a few different payment options. Merchants could use the screen for ads or store specials when not taking payments Bedier says.
Bedier had a colleague come and make a purchase using Apple Pay on an iphone:
Bedier typed in the amount due and the colleague tapped the terminal with his iphone
while placing his finger on the iphone s home button which on newer models is also a fingerprint reader to validate his identity.
The Poynt terminal weighs a little over a pound and contains a wireless modem and eight-hour rechargeable battery
which means it could be carried around a store or restaurant if needed. It will come with three apps including a cash register app
and an app that lets merchants pick out insights about their sales such as what s selling best and worst.
In addition to convincing merchants to pay $299 for the device (Bedier contends this is about what they d pay for one of the new card terminals anyway) Poynt will have to get developers interested.
Bedier says the company won t make money from sales of the device itself or a cut of payment fees.
Instead it plans to take a cut of revenue from sales of apps that will run on the device.
This means Poynt is largely dependent on the success of developer apps for its survival. On Wednesday it showed off its first steps toward corralling developers by naming six partners including Intuit Vend
and Kabbage and releasing a software development kit in hopes of attracting other developers too o
#Blame the Weather for Last Year s Rise in U s. Carbon dioxide emissions A colder winter was one of the main reasons carbon dioxide emissions from energy use rose in the United states by 2. 5 percent in 2013
, according to new data from the Energy Information Agency. Besides a small rise in the price of natural gas and slightly cheaper coal, the weather played the biggest role in in pushing up emissions,
the IEA says. The new numbers show that fluctuations in weather patterns and relatively small changes in fuel prices are enough to counteract the emissions reductions that have resulted from greater solar
and wind power capacity and increased use of cleaner-burning natural gas instead of coal. Compared with 2012,
there were 18 percent more days in 2013 cold enough to cause a spike in demand for energy for heating,
says the EIA. This contributed to an 0. 5 percent increase in the amount of energy used per dollar of GDP,
bucking the trend seen from 2003 to 2012, when that ratio decreased by an average of 2 percent per year.
In addition, the amount of electricity generated using natural gas dropped 10 percent between 2012 and 2013,
while coal generation increased by nearly 5 percent. The price of natural gas rose from $3. 54 per million BTU in 2012 to $4. 49 in 2013
while the price of coal dropped from $2. 38 per million BTU to $2. 35.
More coal and less gas meant a much smaller drop in the U s. energy system arbon intensity?
the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of energy produced. All of this combined to make the carbon intensity of the whole U s. economy,
or the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per million dollars of GDP, rise by 0. 2 percent,
the first such rise since the global recession, as shown in the chart below e
#Internet-Connected Battery Could Bring Smoke alarms Online A startup has come up with a simple way to make smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors more useful:
a nine-volt battery with built-in Wi-fi. The battery can alert you on your smartphone
if the alarm goes off or the battery itself is about to die. Roost the Sunnyvale California-based company behind the battery plans to sell the batteries starting next year for $25 to $35.
We were approaching the Internet-of-things space not from a perspective of##How can we build a whizzy new device that does something?
but##What information do you have in the house that s useful to you that you d like access to when you re not home?
says cofounder and chief technology officer James Blackwell. The idea could reach beyond alarms. Roost has its sights set on other devices battery-powered
and not that are excluded currently from the growing throng of connected gadgets. Roost s first batteries which are based lithium
and meant to last for more than five years contain a Wi-fi chip and sensors for audio detection and voltage monitoring.
To get one working with a smoke alarm you d set it up with a forthcoming Roost smartphone app.
Using the app you can give a battery a name (like living room or kids bedroom) and connect it to your home Wi-fi
and then insert it in the battery compartment of the alarm. Right now Roost has a working prototype in a plastic box about the size of an external hard drive;
Blackwell expects a battery-sized version to be ready in the spring. Roost plans to go beyond the nine-volt battery in the future##Blackwell says the company is thinking about AA BATTERIES
since they re commonly used in toys and remote controls. He s also thinking about adding other sensors such as an accelerometer or thermometer to the battery o
#This Method of Robotic Pickup Could Stick The sticky effect seen when you rub a balloon on your hair could be used to help robots pick things up,
greatly expanding what machines can do in factories. Grabit, a spinoff of SRI International, has developed a simple and cheap robotic hand that makes use of electrostatic attraction.
Grabit robot hand, which was demonstrated at the Robobusiness conference in Boston last week, is a little more complex than the balloon trick:
for example, it uses powered electrodes to sustain the electrostatic attraction, and alternating polarities to avoid charge buildup and keep the device from collecting dust.
The new hand is part of a broader trend toward cheap, versatile robotic grippers (see Blob for a Robot Hand.
This new generation of graspers could expand the use of robots and let them collaborate more closely with humans (see ow Human-Robot Teamwork Will Upend Manufacturing.
Electrostatic attraction is used already in some areas of manufacturingor example, to hold microchip wafers in place.
But the trick works best with clean flat, smooth surfaces because the strength of the static cling depends on the size of the contact area.
Electrostatic attraction is suited not to manipulating ultrathin sheets of semiconductor material, for example, because these sheets are curved often.
And it not ideal for picking up irregularly shaped items. Grabit gripper, however, uses flexible materials that have the same electrostatic properties.
Part of the company innovation was developing materials that can conform to an object but still stand up to the wear and tear of factory use,
says company CTO Harsha Prahlad. The flexible surface of the grabber lets it support more weight
and distribute the gripping force more evenly than conventional robots that use suction to pick things up.
This improvement could allow robots to take on new manufacturing tasks, including jobs that involve handling delicate materials such as thin semiconductors for new, advanced solar cells.
But the technology also offers a cheap way to pick up just about anythingabric, bags of chips, 50-pound boxes of paper, single pieces of paper, mobile phones.
Grabit, which was founded in 2011, counts Nike and Samsung among its strategic investors g
#How Magic Leap s Augmented reality Works A Florida startup called Magic Leap announced Tuesday that it had received $542 million in funding from major Silicon valley investors led by Google to develop hardware
for a new kind of augmented reality hardware. The secretive startup has yet to publicly describe or demonstrate its technology,
and declined an interview request. But patent and trademark filings reveal the kind of technology that Magic Leap plans to use to create
what the company CEO and founder Rony Abovitz has called he most natural and human-friendly wearable computing interface in the world.
The filings describe sophisticated display technology that can trick the human visual system better than existing virtual reality displays (such as the Oculus Rift) into perceiving virtual objects as real.
The display technology used in most devices can show only flat, 2-D images. Headsets like the Oculus Rift trick your brain into perceiving depth by showing different images to each eye,
but your eyes are focused always on the flat screen right in front of them. When you look at a real 3-D scene,
the depth at which your eyes are focused changes as you look at objects at different distances away. f we leave out those focus cues we get an experience that not quite realistic,
says Gordon Wetzstein, who leads the Computational Imaging Research Group at Stanford university. Magic Leap patents suggest an alternative approach.
They describe displays that can create the same kind of 3-D patterns of light rays, known as ight fields,
that our eyes take in from the real objects around us. Wetzstein and other researchers have shown that this allows your eyes to focus on the depths of an artificial 3-D scene
just as they would in the real worldroviding a far more realistic illusion of virtual objects merged with the real world.
Earlier this year, Wetzstein and colleagues used that technique to create a display that allows text to be read clearly by people not wearing their usual corrective lenses (see rototype Display Lets You Say Goodbye to Reading Glasses.
He previously worked on glasses-free 3-D displays based on similar methods. And last year, researchers at chip company Nvidia demonstrated a basic wearable display based on light fields.
A trademark filing from July describes Magic Leap technology as earable computer hardware, namely, an optical display system incorporating a dynamic light-field display.
One of Magic Leap patents describes how such a device, dubbed a WRAP, for aveguide reflector array projector, would operate.
The display would be made up of an array of many small curved mirrors; light would be delivered to that array via optical fiber,
and each of the tiny elements would reflect some of that light to create the light field for a particular point in 3-D space.
The array could be semitransparent to allow a person to see the real world at the same time. Multiple layers of such tiny mirrors would allow the display to produce the illusion of virtual objects at different distances.
However, Magic Leap patent also claims that a single layer of the mirrors would be enough
That would allow the mirrors to be reprogrammed using a magnetic field to rapidly display points at different depths fast enough to fool the eye
Magic Leap greatest challenge may be to find a way to seamlessly integrate virtual 3-D objects created by that display with
One of Magic Leap patents covers the use of motion sensors and eye-tracking cameras on a wearable display to figure out at what depth a person eyes are focused.
But Wetzstein says he isn aware of anyone yet demonstrating a wearable system that can track the distance a person is focusing on.
Another of Magic Leap patent filings says that cameras, infrared sensors, and ultrasonic sensors could be used to sense the environment around a person,
and to recognize gestures. Depth-sensing cameras are now relatively cheap and compact (see ntel Says Tablets
and Laptops with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon. But Wetzstein says Magic Leap will need likely to make major breakthroughs in computer vision software for a wearable device to make sense of the world enough for very rich augmented reality. hey will require very powerful 3-D image recognition,
running on your head-mounted display, he says. The company is recruiting experts in chip design and fabrication
apparently with a view to creating custom chips to process image data. Dedicated chips could make that work more energy-efficient, something important for a wearable device.
Magic Leap already employs Gary Bradski, a pioneer of computer vision research and software, notes Wetzstein.
Magic Leap is also trying to recruit people skilled in lasers, mobile and wireless electronics, cameras,
manufacturing supply-chain management, 3-D sensing, artificial intelligence, and video game development. Altogether, many of the underlying techniques Magic Leap needs to realize highly realistic augmented reality have been demonstrated,
says Wetzstein. But the company will have to refine and combine them in ways no one has managed yet to do. think people are starting to realize this is the future of building consumer devices he says. ut it involves big challenges at the intersection of optics, electronics, algorithms,
and understanding the human visual system. h
#Technology and Inequality The signs of the gapeally, a chasmetween the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss in Silicon valley.
On a bustling morning in downtown Palo alto, the center of today technology boom, apparently homeless people and their meager belongings occupy almost every available public bench.
Twenty minutes away in San jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungleeputed to be the largest in the countryas taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe
headquarters and the gleaming, ultramodern city hall. The homeless are the most visible signs of poverty in the region.
But the numbers back up first impressions. Median income in Silicon valley reached $94 000 in 2013, far above the national median of around $53, 000.
Yet an estimated 31 percent of jobs pay $16 per hour or less, below what is needed to support a family in an area with notoriously expensive housing.
The poverty rate in Santa clara County, the heart of Silicon valley, is around 19 percent, according to calculations that factor in the high cost of living.
Even some of the area biggest technology boosters are appalled. ou have people begging in the street on University avenue Palo alto main street,
says Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford university Rock Center for Corporate Governance and at Singularity University,
an education corporation in Moffett Field with ties to the elites in Silicon valley. t like what you see in India,
That not how it works anymore. And suddenly youe seeing a backlash and people are upset.
Indeed, people are stoning buses transporting Google employees to work from their homes in San francisco. The anger in Northern California
The desire to understand why inequality seems to be reaching such troubling levels no doubt accounts for the remarkable success this year of The french academic economist Thomas Piketty Capital in the Twenty-first Century,
Economists have warned long that inflation-adjusted wages for low-and middle-income workers have been flat or declining since the late 1970s in the United states,
even as its economy has grown. Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of economics, greatly expands on this idea,
documenting the exploding wealth of the very rich in the United states and Europe and comparing the trend with developments over the last few centuries.
Building on research conducted with his colleagues Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley,
and Anthony Atkinson, an economist at the University of Oxford, Piketty collected and analyzed data, including tax records,
and several other European countries in which such historical data are available.)The gap between the wealthy and everyone else is largest in the United states. The richest 1 percent of the population has 34 percent of the accumulated wealth;
The top 10 percent now accounts for 48 percent of national income; the top 1 percent makes almost 20 percent
The disparity in the portion of income earned from workhat economists call labor incomes particularly striking.
bove a certain level, it is very hard to find in the data any link between pay and performance.
Privately held wealth in some European countries is now about 500 to 600 percent of annual national income,
where r is the average return on capital and g is the economic growth rate. When the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate
then the money that rich people make from their wealth piles up while wages rise more slowly if at all.
Since the 1950s, economics has been dominated by the ideaotably formulated by Simon Kuznets, a Harvard economist and Nobel laureatehat inequality diminishes as countries become more technologically developed
and more people are able to take advantage of the resulting opportunities. Many of us suppose that our talents,
what economists like to call uman capital. But the belief that technological progress will lead to he triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat cat stockholders,
and skill over nepotismis, writes Piketty, argely illusory. Not all economists are so pessimistic; in fact, g has been higher than r for most of the 20th century
and continues to be so. Nonetheless, Piketty book is important because of the way he has clarified the magnitude of the problem and its dangers.
stomping around, banging off the walls. Still, as Piketty lengthy analysis suggests, the explanation for the rise in inequality is not a simple one.
Racing Ahead y reading of the data is that technology is the main driver of the recent increases in inequality.
It the biggest factor, says Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of management at MIT Sloan School.
The coauthor, with fellow MIT academic Andrew Mcafee, of The Second Machine Age, Brynjolfsson, like Piketty, has gained recently unlikely prominence for an academic economist.
and both were professors at MIT during the following years. But beyond an agreement that growing inequality is a problem,
While Piketty writing is sprinkled with references to Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, Brynjolfsson talks of advanced robots and the vast potential of artificial intelligence.
The biggest factor is that the technology-driven economy greatly favors a small group of successful individuals by amplifying their talent and luck.
is that the technology-driven economy greatly favors a small group of successful individuals by amplifying their talent and luck,
Brynjolfsson argues that these people are benefiting from a winner-take-all effect originally described by Sherwin Rosen in a 1981 paper called he Economics of Superstars.
and TV had broadened greatly the audiencesnd hence the rewardsor those in show business and sports. Thirty years later
and thanks to software and other digital technologies. Why hire a local tax consultant when you can use a cheap,
state-of-the-art program that is constantly being updated and refined? Likewise, why buy a second-best program or app?
The ability to copy software and distribute digital products anywhere means customers will buy the top one.
Why use a search engine that is almost as good as Google? Such economic logic now rules a growing share of the marketplace;
and building a business becomes less capital-intensiveou don need a printing plant to produce an online news site,
or large investments to create an apphe biggest economic winners will not be those owning conventional capital but,
In an article called ew World Order, published this summer in Foreign affairs, Brynjolfsson, Mcafee, and Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate and professor at New york University, argued that uperstar-based technical change is upending the global economy.
That economy they conclude, will increasingly be dominated by members of the small elite that nnovate
and create. Stay in School The exploding wealth of the very rich is only one part of the story of inequality.
demand for highly skilled workers rises, while workers with less education and expertise fall behind. Though income growth among the top 1 percent is an important phenomenon,
says David Autor, an MIT economist, the disparity in skills and education among the other 99 percent is big deal, a much bigger deal.
The gap between median earnings for people with a high school diploma and those with a college degree was $17, 411 for men and $12, 887 for women in 1979;
by 2012 it had risen to $34, 969 and $23, 280. Education, Autor says, s the most powerful thing you can do to affect lifetime earnings.
In the United states, this education premium began rising steeply in the late 1970s, when the surge of college entrants dramatically slowed
and the availability of high-skill workers consequently dwindled. More recent decades have seen an additional twist.
Automation and digital technologies have reduced the need for many production, sales, administrative, and clerical jobs,
while demand has increased for low pay jobs that can be automated, such as those in cleaning services and restaurants.
The result has been what Autor describes as a arbell-shapedjob market, with strong demand at the high and low ends and a ollowing outof the middle.
And despite the increase in demand for workers in service jobs, there is an ample supply of people who need the work
and can do these tasks. Hence wages for these jobs dropped throughout much of the 2000s, further worsening income inequality.
and Mcafee argument that the transformation of work is speeding up as technological change accelerates.
Research he conducted with a fellow MIT economist, Daron Acemoglu, suggests that productivity growth is not in fact accelerating,
nor is concentrated such growth in computer-intensive sectors. According to Autor, the changes wrought by digital technologies are transforming the economy,
but the pace of that change is not necessarily increasing. He says that because progress in robotics, artificial intelligence,
and such high-profile technologies as Google driverless car are happening more slowly than some people may think.
Despite impressive anecdotal accounts, these technologies are not ready for widespread use. ou would be actually pretty hard pressed to find a robot in your day-to-day life,
and dealing with suddenly changing environments, will remain difficult or expensive to automate for decades to come.
What more, many middle-skill workers could flourish as they increasingly learn to use digital technologies in their jobs.
But the underlying problem for much of the population remains. e have a very skill-driven economy without a very skilled workforce,
he begins abruptly. e used to be a classic middle-class economy. But that all gone.
The economy is bifurcated and there nothing in the middle. He blames globalization for wiping out the semiconductor industry
and other high-tech manufacturing that once prospered in the region, as well as changes in technology that have eliminated well-paid jobs in administration
About 20 to 25 percent of the population works in the high-tech sector, and the wealth is concentrated among them.
This relatively small but prosperous group is driving up the cost of housing, transportation, and other living expenses.
At the same time, much of the employment growth in the area is happening in retail restaurant, and manual jobs, where wages are stagnant or even declining.
It a simple formula for income inequality and poverty. But the nature of technology itself seems to have made it worse.
According to Chris Benner, a regional economist at the University of California, Davis, there has been no net increase in jobs in Silicon valley since 1998;
digital technologies inevitably mean you can generate billions of dollars from a low employment base. here used to be a ladder to get into the middle class,
If economists are right that income inequality is fueled by disparities in skills and education, then the last chance for many people to find a route into the middle class may be in places like Foothill College.
Sprawling across some of Silicon valley most prized real estate in Los Altos Hills, the community college draws students from all over the region.
Many come from its poorest areas, such as East Palo alto and East San jose. Ladder or no ladder, the college provides a fleeting opportunity for those students to at least get within striking distance of the elusive jobs in the nowledge economythat dominates the area.
Judy Miner president of Foothill, is justifiably proud of its accomplishments. Students routinely transfer to prestigious four-year colleges,
including the University of California Berkeley and Santa cruz campuses; as of a few years ago, 17 had gone on to MIT.
But talented though some students are, Miner is also blunt about the challenges facing a school that proudly accepts he top 100 percent of all applicants.
Foothill, like other community colleges, is playing catch up with many students who aren prepared academically for universities. And, she says,
one goal is to change their orldview of where they fit in. When she was growing up in San francisco,
Miner says, her achievements and aptitude opened the possibility of Harvard or Yale, but no one else in her family had gone to college,
and she couldn imagine leaving home to do so. So she commuted on the bus to Lone Mountain College,
a small Catholic school that has closed since. Now, at Foothill, she works with families and local communities to expand the ambitions of students from backgrounds like hers. iketty says the best predictor of access to universities is parentsincome,
says Miner. n California, it the zip code. A ribbon-cutting ceremony at East Palo alto Academy is a poignant indication of how much needs to be done to close the zip-code divide.
It a cloudless, hot day in late August a reminder that the region was prized once land for orchards.
A handful of new two-story concrete buildings surround a courtyard holding a smattering of enthusiastic administrators and a few teachers.
It a relatively modest facility but, by all descriptions, a huge improvement over the cramped building the 13-year-old charter school occupied before.
In a city whose only public high school was shut down in the 1970s (students were bused to neighboring district schools),
East Palo alto Academy represents a noteworthy attempt to address the educational needs of the local community.
The school seems to be turning around the lives of many of its 300 students.
But no one needs to be reminded that less than three miles down University avenue is the campus of Palo alto High, a public school with multiple tennis courts, a synthetic running track,
and a multimillion-dollar media center complete with rows of new imacs and state-of-the-art video equipment.
Meanwhile, East Palo alto Academy has gotten only just a properly equipped chemistry lab, with a fume hood and storage facilities for the chemicals.
The athletic facilities are paved a newly outdoor basketball court whose rims, as one student excitedly points out,
actually have nets. ne of the largest and most prominent debates in social sciences is the role of technology in inequality,
is that the income gaps between those with different levels of education ccount for a good share of the inequality.
It equalizing access to high-quality education. The problem is that we just pay lip service to it.
as many suggest, the overall quality of education, he argues: e have fine schools. For example, Palo alto High school is a fine school.
But everyone needs access to these types of schools. Everyone should have access to the kind of schools we routinely provide middle-class kids.
supply an average of 44 percent of the funding for elementary and secondary schools in the United states, helping to fuel the disparity in educational investments between poor and rich communities.)
Perhaps technology is changing so quickly that people are slow to grasp which skills they might need,
and a high-quality secondary school. And then youe simply not in position to go to college. If workers aren equipped to do the jobs that technology is creating,
he says, t because our institutions are failing us. Dirty Words Understanding what causes income inequality is important
because different answers suggest very different policy solutions. If as Piketty fears, the gap between the very rich and everyone else is partly due to unjustifiably high compensation for top executives
Piketty and his colleague Emmanuel Saez believe that the tax cuts made by Margaret Thatcher
including a global wealth tax, could begin to close the economic gap. But at least in the United states, edistributionis a dirty word in almost any political setting. f we know one thing,
says Robert Solow, a professor emeritus of economics at MIT, t that redistributing income is not something wee very good at.
Solow, a Nobel laureate who is one of the most influential economists of the last half-century,
he income and wealth of the rich will grow faster than the typical income from work.
The most obvious policy recommendations point to education including, as social scientists are increasingly learning, pre-kindergarten and other early education programs.
As Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford, points out, differences in educational achievement are associated now more closely with family income than they are with factors that have been more important in the past,
including race and ethnic background. And researchers have shown that those differences in achievement levels are already set
by the time children enter kindergarten. Inequality in education is not only hurting the chances of poor children to get ahead,
says David Grusky. It is also affecting the supply of high-skill labor. By stifling opportunities for countless talented individuals
e overpay for high-skill workers, which is damaging to the economy. In other words, the lack of access to high-quality education is not just bad for the students in East Palo alto;
it is bad for the companies a few miles away in the world most concentrated center of technology innovation.
Of course, a diagnosis is far from a cure, and a call to improve educational opportunities is far too facileho could argue with that?
The challenges inherent in this kind of change must be acknowledged, and previous efforts to accomplish it have failed.
Providing everyone with access to quality education would require us to transform our schooling system
But if differences in educational achievement based on family incomes are really what driving inequality, Grusky worries,
we can solve the problem by letting people who have privileged access to a good education reap the advantages
It will also strike many as unfairly taking money from those who have earned it. If the goal is based the erit inequalitythat results
then we must attempt to reform educational institutions. That why asking whether technology causes inequality is the wrong question.
Instead, we should be asking how advancing technologies have changed the relative demand for high-skill and low-skill workers,
Surely, rapid advances in technology have exacerbated discrepancies in education and skills, and the rise of digital technologies could possibly be playing a part in creating an extreme elite of the very rich.
The reforms that experts recommend are varied numerous and, ranging from a higher minimum wage to stronger job protections to modifications of our tax policy.
And if Piketty is right about the supermanagers, we need improved corporate governance and oversight to more closely tie compensation to executive productivity.
many will surely be left wondering whether the future looks more like Silicon valley high-tech dynamo driving economic prosperity and wealth inequality at oncer,
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