And now: 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

And now: 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-krugman-got-something-very-right-about-the-internet-the-fax-machine-and-the-economy?sref=vuYGislZ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krug... https://archive.ph/DUDEw https://archive.ph/DUDEw >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.” ... >So again, there was a considerable discussion at the time that the internet would fundamentally change something. Either lead to a perma-boom, or faster growth, or greater productivity, or something fundamentally new in how business cycles worked. And yet we've seen none of that. Instead we’ve had mediocre growth, long broad downturns, and declines in both productivity and general tech investment. >So yes, for sure Krugman was wrong on the societal impacts, such as how much we all have to say to each other. But on the question of the difference between the internet and the fax machine, the data back him up.