RESPONDING TO REVOLUTION – THE FUTURE

If you have a PhD in math or statistics, the revolution you are probably trying to capitalize on today is big data – a term for the vast amounts of digital data we now create and have an increasing ability to store and manipulate.

If works were fashionistas, big data would be this season’s hot new color.  When I interviewed him before a university audience in late 2011, Larry Summers named big data as one of the three big ideas he is most excited about (the others were biology and the rise of the emerging markets). 

The McKinsey Global Institute, the management consultancy’s research arm and the closest the corporate world comes to having an ivory tower, published a 143-page report in 2011 on big data, touting it as “the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity”.

To understand how much data is now at our fingertips, consider a few striking facts from the McKinsey tome.  One is that it costs less than six hundred dollars to buy a disk drive with the capacity to store all of the world’s recorded music.  Another is that in 2010, people around the world stored more than six extrabytes of new data on devices like PCs and notebook computers; each Exabyte contains more than four thousand times the information stored in the U.S Library of Congress.

McKinsey believes that the transformative power of all this data will amount to a fifth wave in the technology revolution, building on the first four:  the mainframe era; the PC era; the Internet and Web 1.0 era; and, most recently, the mobile and Web 2.0 era.

Big data will create a new tribe of highly paid superstars.  McKinsey estimates that by 2018 in the United States alone there will be shortfall of between 140,000 and 190,000 people with the “deep analytical talent” required to use big data.  And it will probably create a handful of billionaires who understand and capitalize on the revolutionary potential of big data before the rest of us do – indeed, one way to understand Facebook’s $100 billion market capitalization is as a bet on big data.

Of the world’s 1,226 billionaires of Forbe’s 2012 Rich list, about 450 are Americans, 271 Chinese, 100 oligarchs from Soviet Unions, etc  The United states has the highest number of self-made billionaires, apart from wealth from oil and real-estate and government-related privatizations.  This is because America pioneered the technological revolution which is the radical paradigm shift that is yielding windfall for those with skill, the luck and chutzpah to take advantage of it.

Culled from “PLUTOCRATS” the rise of the new global super rich - by Chrystia Freeland 

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