CONCEPT
Bounty and Spread
Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s paired terms for the double-edged character of the second machine age: the extraordinary expansion of economic abundance and the simultaneous widening of inequality—two faces of a single coin generated by the same digital engine, requiring distinct analytical and institutional responses.
To capture why the second machine age is neither simply good news nor simply bad,
Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson reached for two words that refuse to resolve into a single verdict. Bounty is the extraordinary increase in the volume, variety, and quality of what the economy produces—and the steady fall in its cost. By this measure the digital transformation is an almost unalloyed triumph: access to more goods, more services, more information, and more capability than any humans who have ever lived, often at prices that would have seemed impossible a generation ago, and often at no monetary price at all. Spread is the growing differences in economic outcomes among people—the widening gaps in income, wealth, and opportunity generated by the same technological forces that produce the bounty. The bounty and the spread are linked, not independent: they arrive together, from the same source, by the same mechanism. The