Good times or bad?
From my experience, that is not true.
And in terms of Cell Phones, it took a strong economy with lighthouse/new tech adopters to get it all going. I paid $1,000 for a portable cell phone in 1986. I also paid $.47 min. If it weren't for the strong growing economy, the ability for individuals outside of business to afford $2,000 for a personal computer, or big bucks for cell phones, who knows how long the tech revolution would have taken to get going.
You think investors are going to put up seed money for unproven tech when the economy is in the tank?
These, along with many other national and international sea changes all occurred with the resurgence of the United States brought about by Reagan and his policies.
A) This economy has not been "in the tank" since the great depression and B) since at least WW2 there has always been the means to draw out investment for business efficiency and productivity and hence we do not even have to consider what investors do when the economy is "in the tank". There is no dearth of available investment dollars in the country for business efficiency and productivity tools unless money is being chocked off even more than Paul Voker had to as a means to control Inflation.
The Right is totally bought into is HOW BAD the economy was before Reagan and now before Trump. This economy has been and remains the strongest economy on the planet and that certainly has been the case since the biggest one time boon anybody ever heard off for this country, WW2. It has grown at a faster pace over a longer time horizon than any other economy including China's even including the 2007-2009 financial meltdown.
Carter's Stagflation simply needed Paul Volker, somebody who realized that you could not solve both Inflation and Stagnation at the same time. You needed to solve Inflation first, regardless of how painful that might be. Enter Paul Volker halfway through the Carter Presidency. Once we got Inflation under control we had squeezed borrowing down to almost nothing in that effort and STILL the technologies we all use everyday were continuing their development phases.
Another example, all of these WiFi networks now resident right in every home had its start in WLAN, the Wireless Local Area Network. All of the founding patents come out of NCR...the National Cash Resister Company. All of this gear that sits in our homes, every single teeny tiny little bit of the systems and hardware we take for granted as consumer electronics received their early funding as developments of business efficiency and productivity tools and their funding was based on business market penetration rates.
Everything from the development of PC computer systems that drove business away from the hierarchical business model that sprung from the mainframe were developed as business efficiency and productivity tools. Consumer products rode on the backs of those developments, not the other way around.
The home computer....was going NOWHERE until IBM made its compatibles designed for business use available for home PC's. The home PC was essentially a hobby device without the means to allow a home user to unlock its potential before that. That is what released the power of the PC as a home consumer electronics device.
Reagan for his part, simply "packaged" up necessary economic stimulus packages in sound bite sized bits for consumption by the American public. However it was not some magical revitalization of the American economy which was already a spirited business environment. It was simply the next step after Paul Volker had wrung Inflation out of the economy. Just as Obama eventually reached for too much stimulation in his time pouring money down a rathole, Reagan reached for too much stimulation in his time and Trump has reached for way too much stimulation in his time pouring much more money down a rathole. Frankly, Trump's is by far the worst of the three. Its not even close.
And as a kicker, the pile of junk FAA we have today and the pile of junk FCC I dealt with in my time as an exec all had their genesis in Reagan overzealous deregulation. Trump is engaged in an even more ill conceived and corrupt process for deregulation than Reagan ever heard of. But its not light years different from Reagan's in concept. It is just miles more corrupt and miles less well conceived or intended.
Our biggest economic problem is an unwillingness to and lack of interest in turning what is effectively a 19th century skilled labor force into a 21st century skilled labor force, something we should have been doing for at least the last 25 years. Its not globalization or Immigration or trade deficit or any of the horse crap Trump yammers about constantly. Its insistence that the past will live again.
'Dominate' is a verb and incorrect in this context.
