Key Insights:
Information really wants to be free—if it is not free, if it is “charged for” by advertising, or otherwise, you will get into a world of hurt.
In the information age the capitalist mode of production has become a fetter on economic development and human flourishing: Friedrich Engels was right.
We need free public-funded Mastodon < servers for everyone.
No! We don’t!
We need John back in the future, to talk about: (a) the euthanasia of the rentier, what is misnamed “secular stagnation” and the coming of a capital-slack economy.
BitCoin, meme stocks, and so forth are a reflection of this capital-slack economy.
We need John back in the future, to talk about how Elon Musk is a walking, talking, ranting, tweeting meme stock in human form.
We need multiple measures of economic activity: never draw strong conclusions from only one.
Xi Jinping’s plan to shut down social media and have more people building semiconductors to put inside missiles and killer robots does not appear, so far, a great success.
The ratio of Google’s user value to its real factor cost is on the order of 20-to-1.
Google’s huge market power and profit rate powers the greatest AI-innovation engine in teh world today.
Hexapodia!
References:
Ralph Bakshi: Wizards…
Sean Carroll & John Quiggin: Interest Rates and the Information Economy…
Friedrich Engels: Socialism: Utopian & Scientific…
Google: Sankey Diagram for Google…
John Quiggin: Capitalism without capital doesn't work: The future of the information (non) economy…
John Quiggin: The Not‐So‐Strange Death of Multifactor Productivity Growth…
Chad Syverson: Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations for the US Productivity Slowdown…
Wall Street Journal: GOOG | Alphabet Inc. Financial Statements…
Wikipedia: Mastodon…
Wikipedia: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn…
+, of course:
Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>
PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLV: Information Goods & þe Measurement of Economic Growth, wiþ Special Guest John Quiggin