This Time is Different: How Big Data Has Left the Middle Class Behind

What if innovation is driving economic stagnation and inequality? That's the question Charles Leadbetter analyzes in "The Whirlpool Economy" over at the UK Innovation Foundation's Long+Short site. He makes key points about the current relationships between innovation and the economy but misses partly what may make the new technology of big data a particularly toxic driver of current economic inequality. That stagnation haunts the U.S. and especially Europe is a common observation, but as Leadbetter notes, it's a "a very strange one, for it comes at time when our lives are in the midst of incessant change, much of it brought on by what claim to be radical innovations."