De Long on network economy

[Brad De Long]

>        First, I should say that I have not bought nor do I now buy the
>concept of an "information economy".  I think software is very much like
>other goods in the marketplace and is simply more of the kind of thing that
>has been sold in the capitalist marketplace since its inception.  Software
>is developed by people who need to be educated and thus relatively
>unproductive during that time.  The resources spent in their upkeep and the
>upkeep of the relatively unproductive people who train them are the scarce
>and "rival" resource.  If the resources that support information were not
>"rival", then there would be Stanford's, Oxford's and M.I.T.'s everywhere
>and accessible to everyone.

The economies of scale are enormous, however...

And when you look around--at your average Barnes-and-Noble, say--it 
does offer you an extraordinary range of intellectual resources at an 
extraordinarily low cost (once you can solve the problem of figuring 
out which books you should read and which books you should ignore)...

Brad DeLong

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"Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory 
of money] is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading 
guide to current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead. 
Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in 
tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long 
past the ocean is flat again."

  
--J.M. Keynes
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J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley;
Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones
(510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/
<delong at econ.berkeley.edu>