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How Does a Poor Economy Affect Tech Innovation?
sshuber writes "It's no secret that the US and other parts of the world are currently having some economic problems. How is this affecting new technologies under development? With the large numbers of layoffs, are we seeing projects, such as things under R&D, that are being axed? Are companies playing it safe and sticking with what they know sells in lieu of pushing the envelope? Finally, how is this affecting the open source community, either positively or negatively?" A lot of open source work happens with the backing or at least the sufferance of corporations. Do laid-off tech workers contribute fewer cycles to open source projects, or more?
If by rural America you mean farmers, they are doing fantastic right now. They can either get paid to not grow stuff, grow wheat and sell it for food at record high prices, or grow corn and sell it at record high prices and get the ethanol subsidy from the gov.
:)
I agree that the economy is pretty poor right now, but it's not the farmers who are currently suffering
What large numbers of layoffs?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
However, disparity of wealth distribution isn't even the point in contention (no one disputes that it is a real problem).
Why would that be a problem? I'm from India. There is greater gap between the rich and poor now than there was in the 1980s. But, everyone is richer than we were in the 1980s.
In the 80s in India, the situation was comparable to a rich guy having $10 and a poor guy having $9 and now, it is as if the rich guy has $1000 and the poor guy has $90. Clearly, in the second scenario, the "gap between rich and poor" is higher, but is it the worse scenario among the two I've presented?