Personally, I blame spreadsheets. Well, not spreadsheets per se, but their ability to ease quantification of certain money streams above others. They make it ea

Personally, I blame spreadsheets. Well, not spreadsheets per se, but their ability to ease quantification of certain money streams above others. They make it easy to optimize profit margin in the short term, and dismiss long-term, difficult to quantify investments. The short term numbers are nice and solid, and the long term risk and investment are fuzzy. In the near past, this focus improved the economy, but now I think we're in a stage of overoptimization of short term profits over real value. You can see where real GDP is now beginning to tail off in the charts - it happens later than the salary drop but it's there. Company lifetimes are getting shorter (showing misallocation of risk & R&D, and less buffer to weather mistakes & downturns), general numbers of new business starts are lower (suspect this is a side effect of less time & salary for workers). Worker salaries are hit as a big side effect too.. how you do quantify long term value of a worker - it's easier to quantify short term worker outputs as shallow primary effects and ignore the longer term secondary effects of retention and experience. Now compare fuzzy secondary effects against the calculation of short term profit projections. You can see how jobs are easily slashed, or moved overseas... even if three to five years down the line you lose some efficiency (it's not quantified so it doesn't exist in a cost-benefit trade off).