The Economic Consequences Of IT: The IT Revolution’s Meager Benefits & Major Schisms

Find out more about this event on our website: https://bit.ly/3LFiyCm Since 1980 the IT revolution has brought amazing changes, but it has been accompanied by rising inequality and low growth that has left many people feeling stranded, stoking social discord and populism. This lecture links these trends to how and where IT is produced. Because IT is mainly created by skilled workers it has boosted their wages. Importantly, this rise in inequality has been exacerbated by the concentration of IT firms in wealthy, crowded cities. Rising housing costs bottled up IT's benefits in increasingly expensive cities, raising labor misallocation and lowering growth in the rest of the country. Fortunately, the technological cycle is starting to turn, implying a future of higher growth and lower inequality. Speaker: A graduate of Cambridge and Stanford Universities, Tamim Bayoumi is currently at King’s College London as a visiting scholar. Before that he had a long and varied career at the International Monetary Fund, working on the United States, Japan, the World Economic Outlook, and the impact of technology on the global economy. He is also the author of the book Unfinished Business which traces the origins of the 2008 North Atlantic Financial Crisis and which was an FT Economics Book of the Year in 2017.