What we can be sure is that the growth of sophisticated financial systems will continue to play an important role in fashioning the changes in all of our lives, including funding (often speculatively) the technologies that have transformed our world already from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and are now perhaps shaping the first post-industrial information economy.

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In 1954 he was invited to Japan to give a series of lectures which were subsequently credited by the Japanese with having been the basis of their quality-focused post-war industrial economy.

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Enabling post-industrial lifestyles is an area of the economy that China cannot compete with and never will.

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BERR's message is that the government favours a mixed economy, not a post-industrial jungle, and will take steps to promote one.

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But just as the industrial revolution was built on coal, the post-second-world-war economy was built on cheap oil.

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