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Managers have largely overlooked computer technology as a valuable resource in creating competitive advantage. To rectify the situation, companies will have to overcome resistance to change, heal the data processing/general management breach, and take a long, hard look at the economic issues involved.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an analysis of the improbable events of housing market bubbles occurring in a period when US and UK central bankers were responding to perceived risks of a new deflation.

The methodology focuses on how the anti-deflation policies implemented by the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England contributed to the housing market bubbles. The central bankers perceived the deflation as a Keynesian short-run deficiency in aggregate demand, triggered by a financial crisis. Indications are that the deflation is in the nature of long-run aggregate-supply-driven trend as explained in Veblen’s theory of “chronic” deflation driven by cost-reducing advances in technology and globalization.

The Keynesian anti-deflation policies of the Federal Reserve and Bank of England failed to counter the deflation risks while contributing to housing market bubbles. Moreover, the policies failed to address the structural problems of unemployment and income inequality associated with long-run aggregate supply deflation.

Effective policies must be based on a correct theoretical understanding of the problems. The chronic nature of the new deflation points to the need for new approaches to deal with the negative income and employment effects that exclude an increasing number from the housing markets.

The term “curriculum” has been used almost exclusively in educational circles to refer to plans for the conduct of learning lessons in school classrooms. This paper argues that the concept can be productively expanded to describe learning processes in workplaces, including those in which learning is not the intentional outcome of an interaction. The article first reviews conventional conceptions of curriculum, and then draws on theories of cognition and learning base in phenomenology, symbolic interactionism and situated learning to identify some of the features of a naturally‐occurring curriculum in the workplace: the socio‐technical and pragmatic elements of the knowledge used in the work environment, the classification and framing of knowledge‐use, and the extent to which participants are expected to use the various forms of knowledge. That is, curriculum is essentially a socially‐constructed ordering of the knowledge‐use in a social context. These concepts are applied to two settings in which high school interns were supposed to be learning something: a history museum and a veterinary clinic.