>This is a million-fold increase in forty years-- a thirty-five percent per year increase in information processing power.(posted 8757 days ago)I think you're going to drastically overestimate if you use an information-theoretic definition here; particularly if you analogise to horsepower. The amount of "information" in the normal use of the word per bit of information- theoretic information has fallen very rapidly -- ASCII gives you almost one bit per bit, a huge great javascripted website must be heading for one bit of real information per kilobyte delivered. Whereas I don't think anything comparable has happened with regard to horsepower.
And you don't need investment banking to build large factories -- the Europeans built them using bank lending.
cheers
dd