One possibility is that we have reached a point where the barriers to entry in what would be the job creating sectors are being held artificially high by a combination of regulatory capture and a global intellectual property regime that is tilted towards incumbent rights owners and against new entrants. Call it the Deadlock Hypothesis. You see it in medicine, where it's clear that there is a 30 year backlog of potential new technologies that cannot be brought to market because the process for clearing patent rights is too expensive for any organization small enough to be truly innovative (automated pathology labs to pick one example).You see it in the payment industry where it's effectively impossible for new entrants to innovate without the permission of the established players (cf. the story of Square). For all the rhetoric and ideology of free markets our regulatory infrastructure is geared towards incumbents in ways that make it insane to invest in industries that would be creating new jobs now and in the future.
