The new high-tech age is not a new Industrial Revolution. It is merely an expansion of it. It is, in a way, similar to the coming of jet airplanes to make journeys faster. While there has been much promise that the computer will spark an entirely new and improved economic system, there is little proof that this is happening. We are in an age where each day new "dot.com" companies are being formed, making instant millionaires out of ordinary computer nerds (and seeing many of them lose all those millions when the companies fail to perform or even earn a fair profit).
Rather than think of this new high-tech infusion in the world's economic institutions, one should consider this the age of a new type of entrepreneur. As Thorstein Veblen wrote: "The material framework of modern civilization is the industrial system, and the directing force which animates this framework is business enterprise." (Veblen 1) Business enterprise, as we enter the 21st century is nothing more than creating an acceptable combination of product or service availability matched to consumer needs.
What is interesting in this new system of business enterprises is that human capital- always thought of as one of the most precious and valuable sources of a company's success and dominance has been reduced to computer programmers and customer service representatives. In essence, the "new" human capital represents an avid consumer population which is more demanding and weary of time-consuming ordering and purchasing at a retail store. Perhaps one example of this movement away from the traditional store is the success (at least in terms of customers, not profitability) is Amazon.com, which now has enormous warehouses filled with books, as well as a source for getting to publishers with orders of older, or hard-to-find volumes. If, as ergonomists insist, time is a greater impediment to "normal" buying habits, then human capital has an upside as well as a ...