6 ms·

The way in which Krugman was wrong is actually more subtle than it seems. He critiques Metcalfe's Law as the reason why it won't be impactful, not the raw proce

The way in which Krugman was wrong is actually more subtle than it seems. He critiques Metcalfe's Law as the reason why it won't be impactful, not the raw processing power or bandwidth: "most people don't have anything to say to each other". And you can certainly look at the average comment thread and think, "wow, most people don't have anything to say to each other." The benefit of wider access wasn't realized so directly. But by 2005 what had happened instead was the start of aggregation-as-a-service. Instead of wandering around different people's web sites at random or reading the Usenet firehose, you could read Slashdot, Digg, your RSS feed, your Livejournal, etc. All of these added ways of curating, either through the site's proprietary algorithm, or by simply acting as a slightly smarter bookmark that could track posts-over-time. That allowed signal-to-noise to increase, which realized a lot of the benefits we take for granted now, but also created the ethical perils of how to do good curation and not get stuck in a spiral of negative engagement. The prize still isn't in the raw data capacity, but how to get our minds onto the information most useful and relevant to our lives.

skmurphy 4y ago
From Paul Saffo "It's the Context" (Wired 1994) http://www.saffo.com/essays/its-the-context-stupid/ http://www.saffo.com/essays/its-the-context-stupid/ "The seductive chaos of the Internet today offers hints at why these agents to come will be so important. Like Alice’s Restaurant, you can get anything you want — but unless you have software help, you might never find what you are looking for." "It is this avalanche of content that will make context the scarce resource. Consumers will pay serious money for anything that helps them sift and sort and gather the pearls that satisfy their fickle media hungers. The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the banal expanses of cyberspace."
throw0101a 4y ago
Copy-pasting my comment from another sub-thread: As Joe Weisenthal (co-host of Odd Lots podcast) wrote last year, Krugman wasn't was wrong as most people seem to think: > So the first part of Krugman’s prediction was obviously, completely, unequivocally wrong. It turns out that people have a lot to say to each other. More than we ever thought. A total zero on that one. Points to the dunkers. > The more interesting half of the quote though — and the one that the critics mostly remember — is the second part about the impact on the economy being no greater than the fax machine. This one is completely defensible. > As Skanda Amarnath, head of research at Employ America, wrote to me, what people see as a major economic impact is really the social impact. From a true data impact, Krugman wasn’t wrong. “Productivity growth has been substantially weaker during the age of the internet,” Amarnath wrote. “The same deceleration is visible in terms of both nominal and real investment in software and even the broadest definition of hardware (information processing equipment). There has been some shifting and cannibalization of activity as a result of retail moving to e-commerce channels, and new media dominating advertising services at the expense of old media, but if we’re talking about macro impact beyond substitution, the burden of proof is with those eager to mock Krugman on this point.” * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krugman-got-something-very-right-about-the-internet-the-fax-machine-and-the-economy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krug... * https://archive.ph/FD6GR https://archive.ph/FD6GR As Krugman himself stated in 2018: > I must have tossed it off quickly (at the time I was mainly focused on the Asian financial crisis!), then later conflated it in my memory with the NYT piece. Anyway, I was clearly trying to be provocative, and got it wrong, which happens to all of us sometimes. * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff... It's been over twenty years since Krugman wrote that article: people need to get over it. It was a throw away article for a now-defunct B-list publication. People seem to like to dunk on Krugman for this 1998 pop-econ article, but don't bother looking at his academic work. For example this was also published in 1998: And here's something else that he published in 1998: > THE LIQUIDITY TRAP-that awkward condition in which monetary policy loses its grip because the nominal interest rate is essentially zero, in which the quantity of money becomes irrelevant because money and bonds are essentially perfect substitutes-played a central role in the early years of macroeconomics as a discipline. […] * https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/its-baaack-japans-slump-and-the-return-of-the-liquidity-trap/ https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/its-baaack-japans-sl... Which kind of has become important over the last few decades as Japan, and now many other countries (especially post-GFC), have to deal with luke warm growth: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_stagnation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_stagnation * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y ago
Perhaps Krugman never had a BBS account.

skmurphy 4y ago

From Paul Saffo "It's the Context" (Wired 1994) http://www.saffo.com/essays/its-the-context-stupid/ http://www.saffo.com/essays/its-the-context-stupid/ "The seductive chaos of the Internet today offers hints at why these agents to come will be so important. Like Alice’s Restaurant, you can get anything you want — but unless you have software help, you might never find what you are looking for." "It is this avalanche of content that will make context the scarce resource. Consumers will pay serious money for anything that helps them sift and sort and gather the pearls that satisfy their fickle media hungers. The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the banal expanses of cyberspace."

throw0101a 4y ago

Copy-pasting my comment from another sub-thread: As Joe Weisenthal (co-host of Odd Lots podcast) wrote last year, Krugman wasn't was wrong as most people seem to think: > So the first part of Krugman’s prediction was obviously, completely, unequivocally wrong. It turns out that people have a lot to say to each other. More than we ever thought. A total zero on that one. Points to the dunkers. > The more interesting half of the quote though — and the one that the critics mostly remember — is the second part about the impact on the economy being no greater than the fax machine. This one is completely defensible. > As Skanda Amarnath, head of research at Employ America, wrote to me, what people see as a major economic impact is really the social impact. From a true data impact, Krugman wasn’t wrong. “Productivity growth has been substantially weaker during the age of the internet,” Amarnath wrote. “The same deceleration is visible in terms of both nominal and real investment in software and even the broadest definition of hardware (information processing equipment). There has been some shifting and cannibalization of activity as a result of retail moving to e-commerce channels, and new media dominating advertising services at the expense of old media, but if we’re talking about macro impact beyond substitution, the burden of proof is with those eager to mock Krugman on this point.” * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krugman-got-something-very-right-about-the-internet-the-fax-machine-and-the-economy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krug... * https://archive.ph/FD6GR https://archive.ph/FD6GR As Krugman himself stated in 2018: > I must have tossed it off quickly (at the time I was mainly focused on the Asian financial crisis!), then later conflated it in my memory with the NYT piece. Anyway, I was clearly trying to be provocative, and got it wrong, which happens to all of us sometimes. * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff... It's been over twenty years since Krugman wrote that article: people need to get over it. It was a throw away article for a now-defunct B-list publication. People seem to like to dunk on Krugman for this 1998 pop-econ article, but don't bother looking at his academic work. For example this was also published in 1998: And here's something else that he published in 1998: > THE LIQUIDITY TRAP-that awkward condition in which monetary policy loses its grip because the nominal interest rate is essentially zero, in which the quantity of money becomes irrelevant because money and bonds are essentially perfect substitutes-played a central role in the early years of macroeconomics as a discipline. […] * https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/its-baaack-japans-slump-and-the-return-of-the-liquidity-trap/ https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/its-baaack-japans-sl... Which kind of has become important over the last few decades as Japan, and now many other countries (especially post-GFC), have to deal with luke warm growth: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_stagnation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_stagnation * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y ago

Perhaps Krugman never had a BBS account.