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This is especially true of the information economy, given its potential to underpin other sectors. The goal is to spread technology much wider, including into areas we cannot fully envisage right now. These technologies are highly unpredictable and disruptive. Just as the impact of electricity cannot be adequately expressed in gigawatts, the real measure of the information economy won’t be in terabytes but in how far it transforms everything else we do.

Vince Cable is the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills

“Lending standards have gotten suffocatingly tight in the wake of the housing bust, and young people with too much student debt compared to their income, or who’ve fallen behind on their loan payments, may simply be unable to qualify for a mortgage. As the Fed noted, student borrowers now also have worse credit scores, on average, than their ed-debt-free peers.”

“Since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau highlighted a year ago that student debt had surpassed the $1 trillion threshold, others have warned about the impact on the broader economy. Last year, the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research described how student debt might impact demand for mortgage credit. The Federal Reserve Board’s open market committee discussed whether student debt is impacting household spending. And just a few weeks ago, the Financial Stability Oversight Council discussion of student debt in its annual report added to the chorus.”

“The unemployment rate for college graduates in April was a mere 3.9 percent, compared with 7.5 percent for the work force as a whole, according to a Labor Department report released Friday. Even when the jobless rate for college graduates was at its very worst in this business cycle, in November 2010, it was still just 5.1 percent. That is close to the jobless rate the rest of the work force experiences when the economy is good. Among all segments of workers sorted by educational attainment, college graduates are the only group that has more people employed today than when the recession started.”

“It still might be the case that tech companies are having trouble finding specific skill sets in certain niches (think cloud software development, or Android programming), but there simply aren’t any signs pointing to a broad dearth of talent.”

“Compared to cars and houses, higher education is a much safer investment. For all the media criticism about college losing its luster, you could make a good argument that it’s never been more important. While the returns to college have flattened recently, wage growth has been even weaker (or negative) among non-college grads. As a result, the “bonus” that young workers get from going to college, which economists call, the “college premium,” has tripled in the last 30 years. Today, the share of the 18-24-year-old population enrolled in school is at an all-time high 45 percent today.”

“The turn of the new millennium is when the automation of middle-class information processing tasks really got under way, according to an analysis by the Associated Press based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2000 and 2010, the jobs of 1.1 million secretaries were eliminated, replaced by internet services that made everything from maintaining a calendar to planning trips easier than ever. In the same period, the number of telephone operators dropped by 64%, travel agents by 46% and bookkeepers by 26%. And the US was not a special case. As the AP notes, “Two-thirds of the 7.6 million middle-class jobs that vanished in Europe were the victims of technology, estimates economist Maarten Goos at Belgium’s University of Leuven.” Economist Andrew McAfee, Brynjolfsson’s co-author, has called these displaced people “routine cognitive workers.” Technology, he says, is now smart enough to automate their often repetitive, programmatic tasks. ”We are in a desperate, serious competition with these machines,” concurs Larry Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University. “It seems like the machines are taking over all possible jobs.” Like farming and factory work before it, the labors of the mind are being colonized by devices and systems. In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now it’s less than 10%. How many decades until the figures are similar for the information-processing tasks that typify rich countries’ post-industrial economies?”