5 ms·

New Economy, New Wealth

32 points by jasondavies 16y ago

drcode 16y ago
Provocative, but too breezy to be convincing.
- _delirium 16y ago
  Same reaction here. In particular, it doesn't explain why this is a turning point. We've been hearing about the "information economy" for 30 years now. Why is 2010 suddenly its long-awaited triumph? The 1980s' argument was the advent of the widely accessible personal computer, and the 1990s' argument was the rollout of the internet to the general public. What's the 2010s' argument?
mark_l_watson 16y ago
That was good - I bookmarked it to run through again. I really like the part of this not being a recession, but the end of an old economy and the transition to something new where 1/4 of what runs the economy (information) can actually become more valuable as it is shared - not necessarily a scarce resource.
kiba 16y ago
Metacurrency? The work is already done and it's called bitcoins. Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency system with a very vibrant community and several enterprises. It's also a system in which nodes trust no one and verify all transaction in the network. http://bitcoin.org http://bitcoin.org Austrian school and other economic models are not obsolete at all. Their tools just need to be shifted to analyze the information realm. In fact, Austro-libertarians in general already reject intellectual property. Indeed, the system paradigram is beginning to replace the old system of nation states and coercion and replace them with anarchistic law system meditated by computers. Computer code will be law. The world is starting to look more like the Diamond Age, everyday.
- narrator 16y ago
  You know what gives dollars, otherwise known as federal reserve notes, their value? It's that they are the only medium of exchange that can be used to settle tax liabilities.
  - kiba 16y ago
    Yes, I am aware of the fact but my prediction is reliant on the breakdown of nation-states' monopolistic power.
- jeromec 16y ago
  Wait a minute. From looking over the bitcoin site, the process for currency creation is based upon CPU processing power? The argument given for limiting wealth creation is that, once bitcoin was used enough to have real value, the expense for electricity to perform the calculation approaches a higher amount than would be profitable by doing something else... First, not all computers will utilize electricity uniformly to perform the "calculations". Some computers are just horribly inefficient. Also, it's certainly possible to construct more power efficient computing devices, and do so without even talking about upcoming nano-technology and processing at the atomic scale which would make electricity costs at a macro scale negligible for even the most hard core computing. So right off the bat the bitcoin market does skew its participants with non-uniformity, and a thesis that almost certainly won't hold up within 50 years.
  - kiba 16y ago
    It is certainly possible to have more efficient computing devices, but then it will only increase the difficulty of the problems. The network adjust. More efficient computers will mine more bitcoins in the short run, but not any more in the long run. Even if it is extremely efficient, it is probably a lot easier to just trade for bitcoins.
    - jeromec 16y ago
      But wouldn't the more efficient computers always have an advantage over less capable computers? In other words, for this system to be fair, even assuming the electricity cost argument held up which I don't think it could, wouldn't everyone participating need access to the same kind of computer? The required calculation would be the same for every computer in the network, right?
brc 16y ago
Yawn. All a bit 1998 if you ask me. Look, I found most of it terribly visually impressing in a rock-video type of way. When I can eat or live in a piece of information, then I'll start buying new paradigms with my ears pinned back. All this talk about new economy is a bit old. While I'm impressed about the presentation - that's a very impressive way of showing things - and I agree that command-and-control architecture is done and dusted by sharing and open information models - this whole thing about information being more important than factories is a bit far-fetched. Perhaps for some growth areas of the economy a completely information-based perspective is not only vital, but valid. Maybe more millionaires and billionaires will be minted by clever use of information and digital data. But the majority of the worlds production and income will still be found in digging things around. However, the 'old economy' business of digging things up out of the ground, planting plants and harvesting them, and melting down base minerals to make things from is not going to change. You can layer all types of fancy new diagrams on top of this, but it's not going to change the base. The big indicator should be that the 3 foundations of the current system, as described in the presentation - can all be exchanged for each other. Land for Captial, Capital for Labour, Labour for Land. Try exchanging information for any of these, you won't have much luck, unless we're talking trade secrets or blackmail. Try exchanging open information for a piece of land and see how you get on. Even an iPad has to be made out of stuff dug out of the ground and refined in some way, then shipped across the ocean in an ancient old bit of technology called a ship. That's where the real story in the world economy is, that's where it will remain. Moving information around is just playing with the surplus production given to us by efficient manufacturing and agriculture. If you want the real story on where things are headed, you'd best study things like the baltic dry index, the yield curve and old economy indicators like that. Measuring things in terms of eyeballs, mindshare and information flow is as terminally ridiculous now as it was 10 years ago when this was discredited the first time around.
- danielsoneg 16y ago
  Yes. Thank you. I was at an AR devcamp a bit ago and heard endless effusion over Android and the Maker movement and Open Source and all the ways the hacker community was seizing its own destiny - the problem is, the entire practice is built on top of nationwide wireless data networks delivering internet content to smart phones. If ever there were a more capital-reliant industry, I don't know it. I agree that an information-based industry obeys different economic rules than physical goods trading - the concept of scarcity applies only in terms of creation, not replication or distribution - but it'll no sooner wipe out the industrial economy than the industrial economy wiped out the agricultural economy.
narrator 16y ago
I think what's really going on is now that there is such an enormous amount of slack in the system we have to find new ways to self-actualize. For instance, because of all the cheap labor in China, manufacturing is now turning into an esoteric geek hobby in the U.S with Maker Faire, etc. I see Unemployed people on food stamps spending thousands of hours of their life in WOW and Farmville pretending they have a job because the real economy doesn't need them. Maybe I'm too cynical.. Any idealists want to cheer me up?
thyrsus 16y ago
"Something seems to be wrong here, and tells us APP_ERROR. prezi.com/support might help." Or not. Adobe flash player 10 under Fedora 12. Should I try from a Windows box at work in the morning?
- emanuer 16y ago
  Prezi notoriously does not work on Linux. They didn't fix this since over a year now.
  - jallmann 16y ago
    Hm, seems to work for me on Ubuntu 10.4 (Flash 10,1,82,76)
chipsy 16y ago
The "new" economy is actually one we already had, which has simply become more powerful with the advent of the internet, and should have been present in the slides at each step along economic progression. It's a gift economy where capital is based on reputation and ability to share. This is the same economy you use in local situations - with neighbors, friends, co-workers - to exchange favors. It has the power to get you a job, or to make a deal, or to elect a president, or any number of other things that determine how the work is done and how the goods are dealt out. The agricultural through industrial economies downplayed this form of economic activity because property, ownership and employment proved more suitable for creating an efficient market, but sharing has always been present and has always been taught as a moral ideal. If we didn't participate in that economy, we'd be quite a stand-offish, non-collaborative bunch. Nobody would trust each other. What we have now is the ability to make gift economies based on information global in scale. The capital and labor necessary to start your (scarcity economy oriented) startup are potentially sitting right here on HN, if you know what to say and who to say it to. And PG and co. aren't making money off of the site, but I'm sure they've benefited from it. It's this kind of value that is really what's at stake in a successful info-business venture - the ability of companies to monetize on top of the info or info infrastructures ultimately isn't as important to the economy as the benefits accruing to all of society from just having it around and operating smoothly; finding a reasonable doorway from abundance currency to scarcity currency is what has led to the variety of monetization concepts tried over the last decade(ads, freemium, subscription, paywall, patronage...). This problem of monetization is pervasive throughout information products and is at the root of the whole IP debate: If there weren't money in trading information, would the incentives to create still be there? But the question that isn't answered by these slides is the big one: how to balance ownership-based markets with gift-based ones. While the gift economy is endlessly abundant, how will we distribute the work for the older markets as they grow more efficient? Are there enough jobs to go around now, or do we need to rearrange ourselves to sustain heightened unemployment? How do we make everyone materially wealthy enough to be happy, and not destroy the planet in doing so?

32 points by jasondavies 16y ago

drcode 16y ago

Provocative, but too breezy to be convincing.

_delirium 16y ago
Same reaction here. In particular, it doesn't explain why this is a turning point. We've been hearing about the "information economy" for 30 years now. Why is 2010 suddenly its long-awaited triumph? The 1980s' argument was the advent of the widely accessible personal computer, and the 1990s' argument was the rollout of the internet to the general public. What's the 2010s' argument?

mark_l_watson 16y ago

That was good - I bookmarked it to run through again. I really like the part of this not being a recession, but the end of an old economy and the transition to something new where 1/4 of what runs the economy (information) can actually become more valuable as it is shared - not necessarily a scarce resource.

kiba 16y ago

Metacurrency? The work is already done and it's called bitcoins. Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency system with a very vibrant community and several enterprises. It's also a system in which nodes trust no one and verify all transaction in the network. http://bitcoin.org http://bitcoin.org Austrian school and other economic models are not obsolete at all. Their tools just need to be shifted to analyze the information realm. In fact, Austro-libertarians in general already reject intellectual property. Indeed, the system paradigram is beginning to replace the old system of nation states and coercion and replace them with anarchistic law system meditated by computers. Computer code will be law. The world is starting to look more like the Diamond Age, everyday.

narrator 16y ago
You know what gives dollars, otherwise known as federal reserve notes, their value? It's that they are the only medium of exchange that can be used to settle tax liabilities.
- kiba 16y ago
  Yes, I am aware of the fact but my prediction is reliant on the breakdown of nation-states' monopolistic power.
jeromec 16y ago
Wait a minute. From looking over the bitcoin site, the process for currency creation is based upon CPU processing power? The argument given for limiting wealth creation is that, once bitcoin was used enough to have real value, the expense for electricity to perform the calculation approaches a higher amount than would be profitable by doing something else... First, not all computers will utilize electricity uniformly to perform the "calculations". Some computers are just horribly inefficient. Also, it's certainly possible to construct more power efficient computing devices, and do so without even talking about upcoming nano-technology and processing at the atomic scale which would make electricity costs at a macro scale negligible for even the most hard core computing. So right off the bat the bitcoin market does skew its participants with non-uniformity, and a thesis that almost certainly won't hold up within 50 years.
- kiba 16y ago
  It is certainly possible to have more efficient computing devices, but then it will only increase the difficulty of the problems. The network adjust. More efficient computers will mine more bitcoins in the short run, but not any more in the long run. Even if it is extremely efficient, it is probably a lot easier to just trade for bitcoins.
  - jeromec 16y ago
    But wouldn't the more efficient computers always have an advantage over less capable computers? In other words, for this system to be fair, even assuming the electricity cost argument held up which I don't think it could, wouldn't everyone participating need access to the same kind of computer? The required calculation would be the same for every computer in the network, right?

brc 16y ago

Yawn. All a bit 1998 if you ask me. Look, I found most of it terribly visually impressing in a rock-video type of way. When I can eat or live in a piece of information, then I'll start buying new paradigms with my ears pinned back. All this talk about new economy is a bit old. While I'm impressed about the presentation - that's a very impressive way of showing things - and I agree that command-and-control architecture is done and dusted by sharing and open information models - this whole thing about information being more important than factories is a bit far-fetched. Perhaps for some growth areas of the economy a completely information-based perspective is not only vital, but valid. Maybe more millionaires and billionaires will be minted by clever use of information and digital data. But the majority of the worlds production and income will still be found in digging things around. However, the 'old economy' business of digging things up out of the ground, planting plants and harvesting them, and melting down base minerals to make things from is not going to change. You can layer all types of fancy new diagrams on top of this, but it's not going to change the base. The big indicator should be that the 3 foundations of the current system, as described in the presentation - can all be exchanged for each other. Land for Captial, Capital for Labour, Labour for Land. Try exchanging information for any of these, you won't have much luck, unless we're talking trade secrets or blackmail. Try exchanging open information for a piece of land and see how you get on. Even an iPad has to be made out of stuff dug out of the ground and refined in some way, then shipped across the ocean in an ancient old bit of technology called a ship. That's where the real story in the world economy is, that's where it will remain. Moving information around is just playing with the surplus production given to us by efficient manufacturing and agriculture. If you want the real story on where things are headed, you'd best study things like the baltic dry index, the yield curve and old economy indicators like that. Measuring things in terms of eyeballs, mindshare and information flow is as terminally ridiculous now as it was 10 years ago when this was discredited the first time around.

danielsoneg 16y ago
Yes. Thank you. I was at an AR devcamp a bit ago and heard endless effusion over Android and the Maker movement and Open Source and all the ways the hacker community was seizing its own destiny - the problem is, the entire practice is built on top of nationwide wireless data networks delivering internet content to smart phones. If ever there were a more capital-reliant industry, I don't know it. I agree that an information-based industry obeys different economic rules than physical goods trading - the concept of scarcity applies only in terms of creation, not replication or distribution - but it'll no sooner wipe out the industrial economy than the industrial economy wiped out the agricultural economy.

narrator 16y ago

I think what's really going on is now that there is such an enormous amount of slack in the system we have to find new ways to self-actualize. For instance, because of all the cheap labor in China, manufacturing is now turning into an esoteric geek hobby in the U.S with Maker Faire, etc. I see Unemployed people on food stamps spending thousands of hours of their life in WOW and Farmville pretending they have a job because the real economy doesn't need them. Maybe I'm too cynical.. Any idealists want to cheer me up?

thyrsus 16y ago

"Something seems to be wrong here, and tells us APP_ERROR. prezi.com/support might help." Or not. Adobe flash player 10 under Fedora 12. Should I try from a Windows box at work in the morning?

emanuer 16y ago
Prezi notoriously does not work on Linux. They didn't fix this since over a year now.
- jallmann 16y ago
  Hm, seems to work for me on Ubuntu 10.4 (Flash 10,1,82,76)

chipsy 16y ago

The "new" economy is actually one we already had, which has simply become more powerful with the advent of the internet, and should have been present in the slides at each step along economic progression. It's a gift economy where capital is based on reputation and ability to share. This is the same economy you use in local situations - with neighbors, friends, co-workers - to exchange favors. It has the power to get you a job, or to make a deal, or to elect a president, or any number of other things that determine how the work is done and how the goods are dealt out. The agricultural through industrial economies downplayed this form of economic activity because property, ownership and employment proved more suitable for creating an efficient market, but sharing has always been present and has always been taught as a moral ideal. If we didn't participate in that economy, we'd be quite a stand-offish, non-collaborative bunch. Nobody would trust each other. What we have now is the ability to make gift economies based on information global in scale. The capital and labor necessary to start your (scarcity economy oriented) startup are potentially sitting right here on HN, if you know what to say and who to say it to. And PG and co. aren't making money off of the site, but I'm sure they've benefited from it. It's this kind of value that is really what's at stake in a successful info-business venture - the ability of companies to monetize on top of the info or info infrastructures ultimately isn't as important to the economy as the benefits accruing to all of society from just having it around and operating smoothly; finding a reasonable doorway from abundance currency to scarcity currency is what has led to the variety of monetization concepts tried over the last decade(ads, freemium, subscription, paywall, patronage...). This problem of monetization is pervasive throughout information products and is at the root of the whole IP debate: If there weren't money in trading information, would the incentives to create still be there? But the question that isn't answered by these slides is the big one: how to balance ownership-based markets with gift-based ones. While the gift economy is endlessly abundant, how will we distribute the work for the older markets as they grow more efficient? Are there enough jobs to go around now, or do we need to rearrange ourselves to sustain heightened unemployment? How do we make everyone materially wealthy enough to be happy, and not destroy the planet in doing so?