We have a comparative advantage built up over a long, long period of time in faculty development and research and course development. We've been talking about how technology and the global economy are changing the way we produce and disseminate content, but I wonder how they've affected the content itself. We teach some subjects today because they're no longer just theoretical possibilities, you can actually implement them. This is because without information technology and the direct links it provides to many markets, you can't trade precisely enough. You can hedge risk associated with stock prices by using options, and people do that, but if you want to actually conduct an arbitrage operation, you have to exercise several simultaneous trades in four different exchanges.
Technology now makes it possible.
You can sit at your desk and get real-time information off most of the financial markets in the world and make instantaneous adjustments to all those changes. On the business side, because new information technologies are becoming ubiquitous on a global basis, you get a dramatic change in the efficiency of the supply chain. Thanks to the Internet, you're seeing the systematic elimination of batch processing in favor of doing everything in real time. The Internet makes it possible to keep all the links open all the time. You don't need a dedicated electronic pipe anymore.