I've started collecting notes for my potential Winter '09-10 Stanford CSP class - "The Greatest Innovations of All Times: Past, Present, and Future." This FT interview with Larry Summers, director of the US president’s National Economic Council, has a couple of paragraphs that paint a certain future for the US:

"The president made two things clear to us early on... He would do what he had to to fix the banking system, to get the economy out of the rut in which he was inheriting it. But he had run for president to do long-run, fundamental things, like fixing healthcare, like having real energy policy, like reforming education."

This new American economy, Summers hopes, will be “more export-oriented” and “less consumption-oriented”; “more environmentally oriented” and “less energy-production-oriented”; “more bio- and software- and civil-engineering-oriented and less financial-engineering-oriented”; and, finally, “more middle-class-oriented” and “less oriented to income growth that is disproportionate towards a very small share of the population”. Unlike many other economists, Summers does not believe that lower growth is the inevitable price of this economic paradigm shift.