Visiting Scholar Arthur C. Brooks

Over the past decade, Google and its rivals have enhanced the ease of information-gathering, lowered research costs and made creativity effectively cheaper and easier.

These things are wonderful, to be sure, but there may be a dark side as well. At present, Google is useful largely to educated, information-oriented people--the winners in the idea economy. Effectively, it makes gifted people--those already blessed most by market forces--even more advantaged. Meanwhile, this powerful tool is far less accessible to those unable to use it for reasons of education or computing ability. This undeniably accelerates income inequality in America, which has increased dramatically since the mid-1990s.

Arthur C. Brooks is a visiting scholar at AEI.

_______________

National Fellow David Gelernter

Google changed the world by destroying silly ideas about the Web and giving us a comfortable place to pause and have a cup of coffee before getting back in the car. We no longer believe that the Web (or hypertext) is a useful way to organize information in itself; webs are places to get stuck.

Of course, it's the Internet that actually changed the world--like the first demonstrations of what you could do with petroleum. Google invented the first practical drill bit, but there are many more to come.

David Gelernter is a national fellow at AEI.