Fifty years after Intel launched the microprocessor (1971) and Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer published the recombinant-DNA mechanism (1973) at the heart of “Biotech 1.0,” the age of cheap computing, expensive biosimilar drugs, and genetically modified organ­isms is coming to a close. What new general-purpose technologies might replace these engines of growth? What kinds of social and political arrangements will support or impede the emergence and deployment of those new technologies? That we stand in the midst of a geoeconomic and geopolitical inflection point is increasingly clear, but as Walter Benjamin said, the angel of history always looks backwards. Not being angels, we lean on our asset management expertise to take the riskier path of looking forward and sketching some possible scenarios for the post-inflection future. Place your bets…

What exactly is financialization? How does it relate to what’s happening in the rest of the economy? Does it hinder growth, and if so, how? At the end of the nineteenth century, many on both the left and right regarded finance as a vampire sucking the lifeblood out of “real” businesses, workers, and, in Britain’s settler colonies, local econo­mies. Indeed, Stanford literature professor Franco Moretti has argued that the classic 1897 Bram Stoker novel Dracula…