The Great Restructuring

In 2010, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond published a report entitled, "The Rise in Long-Term Unemployment: Potential Causes and Implications." Nowhere in the report did the words computer, hardware, software, or technology appear, say Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their new ebook, The Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.

The authors, MIT researchers, find this omission shocking because they argue that computers, hardware, software, and technology are the explanation for our current economic woes. The pace of technological change, they say, is "so rapid and so surprising that many present-day organizations, institutions, policies, and mindsets are not keeping up."

This book is a must read for anyone attempting to decipher socioeconomic trends. "We wrote this book because we believe that digital technologies are one of the most important driving forces in the economy today...The root of our problems is not that we're in a Great Recession, or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring."