Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Harvard Business Review has an interesting interview (found via Fred Wilson) with rising stars Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
The first thing an Icelander thinks when he sees those names is, “I wonder if Erik Brynjolfsson is Icelandic?” Indeed, when an Icelandic journalist read about his work in the Economist way back in 1994 he called him up and asked him.
Journalist:
I just read about your research on the effects of technology on the productivity of companies in the Economist and your name caught my eye. Are you of Icelandic stock?
Brynjolfsson:
Yes, in fact I am. My father is from Akureyri (a metropolis in northern Iceland). I was born in Denmark and raised in the US.
We hereby claim him as our own and he will henceforth be referred to as Icelander Erik Brynjolfsson. Don’t worry, we do this all the time.
Over the past few decades the increased productivity technology has brought us only seems to be benefitting a very small proportion of the population, as the graph above illustrates quite nicely. Brynjolfsson and McAffee think that the force behind this “great decoupling” is technology.
My gut reaction, entirely unfounded in any data or reseaerch, is to disagree. The interview is interesting though. And whether or not my beloved technology is the cause of it or not, we do have a problem.
