We don’t really have a problem that there aren’t enough television sets in our society. We really don’t. I mean we did once. I mean it used to be that some people had television sets and some people don’t. We don’t have that problem anymore in America.
You know, if you think about it, there aren’t that many manufactured goods that actually, even families beneath the poverty line, don’t have. Where we have huge gaps are in the provision of services that the people in this room take for granted, for themselves and for their children, that actually aren’t available to a large fraction of Americans.
- Larry Summers
If you follow this reasoning, it also strongly implies that whereas we spent a great portion of the last 50 years making manufactured products more accessible by driving down costs with innovations in design and manufacturing, the current frontier of driving down costs to make something more broadly accessible is in the service sector.
One more reason we’re here working on scaling financial services. (via NYT)
