>So, getting to the point, I'm wondering whether folks hereabouts can point
>me to solid research about the magnitude of this investment? I'd like to
>back up my argument with some solid economic research into the question,
>and I'm not really adept at ferreting that sort of thing out from a
>library, being a humanities type.
That's a pretty hard one to track down. You might try a trade association, some research boutique like Forrester, or one of the haruspicating economists who've tried to measure the productivity boom (e.g., Dale Jorgenson at Harvard or Daniel Sichel at the Fed in Washington).
Here's the BEA's estimates for computer purchases throughout the U.S. economy (the full spreadsheet is at <http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn/comp-gdp.XLS>). Note the enormous gap between nominal and real expenditures - a result of the price indexes the government uses to adjust computer prices for quality changes: a nominal increase of 161% between 1987 and the 2000 peak becomes a 2,292% "real" increase. But we can guess that a good bit of the acceleration in computer investment between 1994 and 2000 was the result of the web - not just on the server end, of course, but also on the user end. Crudely, the average growth rate in nominal computer expenditure was 5.3% from 1907-94 and 10.5% from 1994-2000. Had spending in the latter period increased at the same rate as in the earlier one, expenditures in 2000 would have been $71.2 billion rather than $93.3b. The "excess" expenditure over the boom period - the sum of actual spending less the sum of what spending would have been at the old 5.3% trend - was $109 billion. That's quite crude, and an exaggeration no doubt, but it's a first aproximation of a rough guess.
Doug
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private fixed investment in computers & related equipment
real (1996$) nominal
1987 10.3 35.8
1988 11.8 38.0
1989 14.4 43.1
1990 14.2 38.6
1991 15.4 37.7
1992 20.8 43.6
1993 26.4 47.2
1994 32.6 51.3
1995 49.2 64.6
1996 70.9 70.9
1997 102.9 79.6
1998 147.7 84.2
1999 207.4 90.4
2000 246.4 93.3
2001 239.9 74.2
2002 283.7 74.2