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.

BBC: Of bulbs and bubbles

We took an agricultural economy and transformed it into an industrial economy, then into an information economy.

WHITEHOUSE: Remarks by the President at a DNC event in Austin, Texas

Because we are in an information economy, rather than an industrial one, pursuing growth of industrial jobs today is as misguided as trying to preserve manual labor and farm jobs was in the 1960s and 1970s.

FORBES: "It's About the Economy, Stupid" - Lessons from the Election