In Schumpeter’s creative destruction, the new gets created and the old either adapts or gets destroyed. The pain of destruction is just a price paid for the new opportunities created.

I understand the entrepreneurial appeal of this attitude, but it ignores social costs in the same way that reliance on carbon-based fuels ignores “externalities” like global warming.

It seems important to find a middle ground that encourages innovation and change but with a more robust accounting of social costs.

I’ve no idea how to do this in general. But George Siemens makes the case for finding a middle ground when imagining tomorrow’s universities.

He makes a valuable point.