Technology Stack of an Economy

Industrial Policy #6 - it's all connected and don't ignore the foundations

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A country does not rise to the level of its innovation. It falls to the level of its industrial commons.

The Economy Has a Stack

The idea of a “tech stack” comes from software engineering. The first one I learned about was the LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Linux was the base operating system, Apache was the web server, MySQL handled databases, and PHP stitched it all together to generate webpages. There’s also the MEAN stack—MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, and Node.js. Each stack layers technologies on top of one another, with each layer enabling the next.

The key insight is this: every tech stack has limitations. Some things are easy to build within a stack, others are hard. Constraints matter. And in an economy—especially a production economy—physical constraints matter even more than digital ones.

That’s where this graphic comes in: