“Open and machine-readable”, the president said, is “the new default for government information.

“We argue that the shift from being a goods-producing, manufacturing-based economy to a service economy—what some have termed “deindustrialization”—is causing the pace of economic recoveries to slow. As is typical of economies recovering from the bursting of an asset bubble and a financial crisis, the recovery from the 2007 recession would be longer than usual. But our research suggests that the rise of the service sector has made it even longer than in the past.

“as China becomes richer, is it destined to pass the United States as the world’s most inventive nation? The question is all the more pertinent because many experts contend that America’s inventive spirit is already flagging. As the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel put it to me in an interview, American innovation in recent decades has been remarkably narrowly based. “It has been confined largely to information technology and financial services,” he said. “By contrast in transportation, for instance, we are hardly more advanced today than we were 40 years ago. The story is similar in treating cancer.

“the government is responsible for only 31% of America’s R&D, that may not seem too serious. But it pays for over half of America’s basic research.

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“the canary in the coal mine is the decoupling of gains in productivity and in wages. “Productivity since 2000 has grown faster than in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s…But starting in the late 1990s, we’ve had this decoupling of wages from productivity.”

“There have been big economic changes in the past, but productivity and jobs tracked each other pretty closely,..It is only since 1997 that they decoupled. There is no economic law that says they go together.”

“The density of the population and the buildings make for a unique testing ground for the new kind of infrastructure we’re developing - the low carbon, resource efficient approaches to heating and power generation, transport and waste management. They all work best if done where the demand is greatest, and that means at the city scale.

“Sony hasn’t made a profit in four years. Panasonic has lost money in three of the past four. Along with Sharp, the companies’ combined market value, according to Bloomberg, is $32 billion — making them one-fifth the value of Samsung and one-twentieth the value of Apple.

“In 2007, the US was ranked first by the World Economic Forum, which published the report. By 2011 it had fallen to fifth. This year it dropped to seventh. The chief culprits are bad governance, macroeconomic instability and declining infrastructure.