PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLV: Information Goods & þe Measurement of Economic Growth, wiþ Special Guest John Quiggin
1Description
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>
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