It is true that from 2001 to 2009, the US economy has actually shrunk in size, if measured in oil, gold, or Euros. To that, I counter that every major economy in the world, including the US, has grown tremendously if measured in Gigabytes of RAM, TeraBytes of storage, or MIPS of processing power, all of which have fallen in price by about 40X during this period. One merely has to select any suitable product, such as a 42-inch plasma TV in the chart, to see how quickly purchasing power has risen. What took 500 hours of median wages to purchase in 2002 now takes just 40 hours of median wages in 2009. Pessimists counter that computing is too small a part of the economy for this to be a significant prosperity elevator. But let's see how much of the global economy is devoted to computing relative to oil (let alone gold).
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