Word: high-tech
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...experiencing an unprecedented boom in the great bull market of the past two years. As the stock market has smashed records, more and more private firms, particularly technology companies, have decided to raise cash by selling equities to the public. More capital was raised in IPOs by emerging high-tech firms in 1995--$8.4 billion--than in any other year in U.S. history. And when an IPO is successful, the people who already hold shares in the company make out well. Sometimes very well. Sometimes unbelievably well...
...rich, which only made matters worse. Just think of the Gilded Age, or the 1920s, or--horrors!--the 1980s. This time things are different. When they work right, IPOs reward the people capitalism is supposed to reward--dynamic entrepreneurs, not rapacious monopolists or financial card-sharks. Among high-tech firms, the beneficiaries usually include employees far down in the hierarchy, who were granted stock options, often because the companies couldn't afford high salaries or generous benefits. Certainly, venture capitalists and investment bankers make money from IPOs, and they can be used to palm off lousy securities to the public...
Conservatives and liberals all seem to regard the high-tech entrepreneur as the ideal economic agent. They do so with good reason, for if capitalism is "creative destruction," in Joseph Schumpeter's famous phrase, then people like Marc Andreessen, Steve Jobs, Jeff Braun, Bill Schrader and Doug Colbeth are responsible for the creating part. But is there much that conservative or liberal policies can really do to nurture such enterprise? Would Marc Andreessen work harder under a flat tax? The creating part of capitalism is the part that economic laws do not explain. Like a code writer and his code...
Labor Secretary Robert Reich has warned that legal loopholes encourage some companies "to avoid their responsibility to train U.S. workers for these important high-tech jobs." But to executives who say they cannot find enough homegrown employees to design computers and other advanced products, the Simpson bill is a dangerous threat to America's technological edge. "Instead of building a bridge, this whole effort is carving out a moat," says NAM's Eisen...
...ecstatic, of course, but it is the prospect of intelligent life that fires most people's imagination. "That final step from life to intelligent life is probably the longest shot of all," observes Des Marais. Even so, the small band of astronomers devoted to the search for broadcasts from high-tech extraterrestrials is encouraged: their 35-year quest has always rested on the assumption that planets exist outside Earth's solar system, and the fact that they have been proved right makes the search seem considerably less quixotic...