Among the most important is keeping the marginal cost of adding new users small. To make a new experience available to the maximum number of people at low cost, our societies need better broadband and wireless service, more interoperability for different brands of mobile phones, and more energy-efficient devices. (And yes, we need better WiFi aservice on Amtrak.) These priorities are particularly relevant for experiences like massively multiplayer games, social networks, and other content-sharing platforms where the richness of the experience rises with the number of users.
We also need to understand more about human behavior, the design of experiential products, and the data science that underpins them. As in the case of new information technologies and energy sources, research in these areas has the properties of a public good. Discoveries such as holographic imaging, cybernetic connectivity, and brainwave processing may benefit all of our society, but no individual or company may have sufficient incentive, patience, or capital to undertake the needed research on its own. Governments around the world already give billions in grants for scientific research in biology, medicine, chemistry, and physics. Research into the mind and its links to the five senses could be just as important for enhancing society's wellbeing.
Another requirement for the creation of new experiences is interaction with new content and ideas, which are drawn most easily from cultures outside our own. Greater mixing of cultures, through trade, travel, and migration, can plant the seeds for entire crops of new experiences; consider the West's growing devotion to yoga, the worldwide success of Japanese horror films, or the popularity of Sufi poetry.
Yet lowering obstacles to the movement of people, goods, and services has lately been a low priority in the world's most advanced economies. Negotiations at the World Trade Organization have all but petered out more than 11 years after the launch of the Doha Development Round of talks. Immigration has come under greater constraints in the past decade thanks to the war on terror in the United States, xenophobia in Europe, and parochialism in Asia. And the global economic downturn has led some political leaders to resort to protectionism and poisonous brands of nationalism. Reversing these tendencies would set the stage for a new wave of global growth in living standards.
These new priorities are especially urgent not just because of the scarcity of stuff that the world is facing, but also because of the current trend in its consumption: fewer products that can do more things. Today a watch, calendar, personal stereo, book, briefcase, landline telephone, and even wallet can all be replaced by one device. Yet this one device can carry and convey an infinite number of experiences, and so the scope for higher living standards is similarly unlimited. It's time for economic policies to promote this new kind of growth. There's no app for that -- yet.
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