ENGINEERING THE ECONOMY: "The pursuit of happiness should not be some abstract language in a historic document; it should be the intended outcome of engineers controlling money creation for the purpose of optimizing the U.S. for its people.".

• Author: Jensen, Jarl
• Position: ECONOMICS

ENGINEERS impress us every day and we expect perfection from the technology we purchase but, somehow, when the economy fails, we just accept it. It is rather shocking that we have not found a solution for our economic woes, of which the list is pages long, with mounting national, corporate, personal, and global debt at the front of the queue. Meanwhile engineers are splitting atoms, and landing and reusing interstellar rockets while everything is being electrified. It is like the world has been split into two, there is the world driven by the consumer and then there is the world driven by banks.

The solution is to engineer the economy for the people rather than the banks. However, before we dive into the best ways to engineer the economy, let's explore some existing feats of engineering brilliance that dramatically have reshaped the world.

Take, for example, information technology. Previously, people were forced to travel by horseback or even run to deliver messages of urgency. The insight to domesticated horses was, in and of itself, a profound feat for humanity, but what skyrocketed humanity to another level of growth and progress?

Forms of communication like the telegraph and telephone drastically altered the lives of people living during that time. Individuals could communicate with each other instantly. The sharing of resources escalated to new heights and people were able to see the world in a brand new light. The intercon-nectedness of humanity was driven by this engineering innovation.

Now, let's take a look at modem society--cell phones, for instance. When the very first cell phone hit the scene, the entire fabric of society was changed forever--again. The interconnectedness of people skyrocketed, and business was able to operate on a higher, more-efficient level. An entirely new level of safety and awareness took over the world. Since the inception of the cell phone, the drastic escalation of engineering has provided us with abilities we never could have imagined.

Add to this the digitization of information and, all of a sudden, the phone transformed pictures, music, and video into something that could be created and consumed anywhere. In fact, all of the information and computing processes is available to anyone, anywhere with Internet connection and a cell phone.

Competition for better products puts engineers on a path to continuous improvement of the outputs of the processes they engineer. As long as a product can be made...