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>Nobody relies on it to get to work so they can feed their children I don't think anyone uses that as the criteria of what should be made public. People rely o
by rm999 14y ago
>Nobody relies on it to get to work so they can feed their children
I don't think anyone uses that as the criteria of what should be made public. People rely on car companies and grocery stores to get home and feed their children, but economists aren't fighting to make those public. And federal parks are hardly critical infrastructure but I don't know many people who complain that they are public.
The article is written from a purely theoretical economic perspective, it's not a real proposal, so it's worth addressing it from that perspective. Krugman's argument is basically that there are certain products that add global value but cannot exist without people being forced to pay for it. Many economists - not all - agree this is a good criteria of what should be made public (infrastructure and research would fall in this category). It's hard to imagine that web services could fall under this, but I suspect a lot of people forget that the internet is still in its infancy and companies like google have been able to subsidize loss-creators through insanely high profits. That won't last, google is already scaling back, and the result may be a global destruction in value.
(To be clear I don't want to see things like google reader made public for idealogical reasons, and I think you and most people are the same way, but I think that's out of the scope of addressing Krugman's point)
- alanctgardner2 14y agoThe sore point for me was mostly that the article takes it for granted that Reader had this huge positive externality, because a lot of people are complaining. It's theoretically interesting to say that such a service might be worth publicly subsidizing. It's just annoying that he happened to use Reader as an example, because there has been a glut of news about Reader lately, and I think it's overblown.
- samastur 14y agoWhere does it do that? Basically it says following: * some people I know are upset * we know from economics, but often forget, that some products can be not viable even if people are willing to pay for them * historical solution is to make them public service which also to Krugman seems hard to envison Nowhere does he say anything about importance of Reader.
- kokey 14y agoIn the case of Reader, I believe a number of other services will likely fill the void, one or more which will be able to do it profitably. If Reader was made a public service, we would have lost the potential competitors, and we also would have lost the information on how it would be done profitably and exactly how profitable. I think it would have been nice if Krugman also at least mentioned the potential value of that.
- samastur 14y agoWhy? That was not the point of his article and it is too soon to tell if we would lost anything. Even if we would, he is not obliged to research and write about every possible aspect.