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| Joined: | Mon Nov 21st, 2005 |
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The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web.
It may be time to shed the scarceconomic monetary crankisms being passed off as 'theory'. I'm speaking specifically about the Limited Liability Corporate Nation State Interest/Profit/Wage Paying SYSTEM.
From this:
“every individual will attempt to secure his own requirements as completely as possible to the exclusion of others.” Carl Menger (1840 -1921)
Power works this way:
As power reaches over-abundance the cost of power reach zero while purchasing power increases because power reduces the cost of production.
That is opposite the scarce economic facts associated with production of things that have no power (no power to reduce costs).
Consider the power-less example of interest earning currency whereby the supplier has a monopoly on the supply (such as a legal entity has when competative currencies are outside the law or fined, taxes, and punished out of the market).
The increase in currency (power-less currency) production (inflation) lowers the price (interest rate) and INCREASES the cost of production while purchasing power reduces. The monetary cranks blame that on someone named Keynes. It is false. The blame rests on false people who are false on purpose, for profit - at the expense of their hapless victims.
It does. The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we've always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The "attention economy" and "reputation economy" are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there's something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.
There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.
FREE CHANGES EVERYTHING
Between digital economics and the wholesale embrace of King's Gillette's experiment in price shifting, we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly. How big a deal is that? Well, consider this analogy: In 1954, at the dawn of nuclear power, Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, promised that we were entering an age when electricity would be "too cheap to meter." Needless to say, that didn't happen, mostly because the risks of nuclear energy hugely increased its costs. But what if he'd been right? What if electricity had in fact become virtually free?The answer is that everything electricity touched — which is to say just about everything — would have been transformed. Rather than balance electricity against other energy sources, we'd use electricity for as many things as we could — we'd waste it, in fact, because it would be too cheap to worry about.
All buildings would be electrically heated, never mind the thermal conversion rate. We'd all be driving electric cars (free electricity would be incentive enough to develop the efficient battery technology to store it). Massive desalination plants would turn seawater into all the freshwater anyone could want, irrigating vast inland swaths and turning deserts into fertile acres, many of them making biofuels as a cheaper store of energy than batteries. Relative to free electrons, fossil fuels would be seen as ludicrously expensive and dirty, and so carbon emissions would plummet. The phrase "global warming" would have never entered the language.
Today it's digital technologies, not electricity, that have become too cheap to meter. It took decades to shake off the assumption that computing was supposed to be rationed for the few, and we're only now starting to liberate bandwidth and storage from the same poverty of imagination. But a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want — and free, increasingly, is what you're going to get.
Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com)
Think now. Why is money scarce?
http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Make_Money_Around_Free_Content
Last edited on Tue Feb 26th, 2008 01:55 pm by Joe Kelley