It should be pretty clear that the economy we have today is holding us back.
It's an amoral, debt-riddled system that is riven with corruption and wracked by periodic bouts of extreme instability. Worse, on its current path, the 'turking" future it's building for us is pretty damned grim.
Worse, there's no way to fix this system. No reform is possible. The rot is in the foundation because it is obsolete. It rests on assumptions that are as out-dated, limited, and as dangerous as those that underpinned the agrarian, aristocratic economy it replaced over the last five hundred years.
This means there's only one way to replace it.
It can only be done through wholesale creative destruction. The new economy needs to grow in a way the old system can't corrupt it.
The only vehicle that can do this quickly and in a way that yields a positive results is something called a blockchain company. A company that operates using the same tech that bitcoin uses.
A blockchain company isn't like any company you know.
It's not run organically (it doesn't have faux person-hood). It doesn't have CEO, COO or effing board of directors. It doesn't go to a fund or a bank for funding. It never floats an issue on Wall Street. Blockchain companies don't need all of that legal cruft and the parasitic overhead that comes with it.
The entire company is simply open source software. It's built to provide a function and divide up the rewards of providing that function to the participants.
A company like this runs as software, in the same way bitcoin is run: decentralized. That means the company doesn't pivot, reorganize, or recapitalize. It either provides a useful function it gets paid to do, or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, it is replaced by a new company that does it better.
A blockchain company doesn't have shares of stock. Everything that it earns is paid to the people in possession of the companies coin on a pro rata basis (using the blockchain currency of choice). Ownership is simply a call on this revenue, and all it is paid out in real time.
Earning a blockchain company's coin is done by the company's participants. You can earn coin doing everything from providing cloud services to doing the same types of stuff you already do online (writing, rating, and curating). There are ways to measure all of this and connect these activities to revenue.
Investment, to the extent it is needed to launch a venture is crowdsourced, usually by prepurchasing goods and services to be delivered in the future.
A blockchain company doesn't need Silicon Valley, Wall Street or Washington.
It just needs to be open, decentralized, and useful enough to suck value out of the old economy.
Time horizon on this?
Five to ten years. When it rolls out, the old economy will look fairly quaint and stagnant in comparison.
PS: It's a simple fact that almost all of the new value being created today is virtual. All of this virtual value can be created by blockchain companies at rates and quality levels that are orders of magnitude better than what we see today.
PPS: So far, most tech advances have only obsoleted discrete industries. This one is aimed at the guts of the financial system and everything attached to it.