

New Economy, New Wealth - jasondavies
http://prezi.com/xmzld_-wayho/new-economy-new-wealth/

======
brc
Yawn. All a bit 1998 if you ask me. Look, I found most of it terribly visually
impressing in a rock-video type of way.

When I can eat or live in a piece of information, then I'll start buying new
paradigms with my ears pinned back.

All this talk about new economy is a bit old. While I'm impressed about the
presentation - that's a very impressive way of showing things - and I agree
that command-and-control architecture is done and dusted by sharing and open
information models - this whole thing about information being more important
than factories is a bit far-fetched.

Perhaps for some growth areas of the economy a completely information-based
perspective is not only vital, but valid. Maybe more millionaires and
billionaires will be minted by clever use of information and digital data. But
the majority of the worlds production and income will still be found in
digging things around.

However, the 'old economy' business of digging things up out of the ground,
planting plants and harvesting them, and melting down base minerals to make
things from is not going to change. You can layer all types of fancy new
diagrams on top of this, but it's not going to change the base.

The big indicator should be that the 3 foundations of the current system, as
described in the presentation - can all be exchanged for each other. Land for
Captial, Capital for Labour, Labour for Land. Try exchanging information for
any of these, you won't have much luck, unless we're talking trade secrets or
blackmail. Try exchanging open information for a piece of land and see how you
get on.

Even an iPad has to be made out of stuff dug out of the ground and refined in
some way, then shipped across the ocean in an ancient old bit of technology
called a ship. That's where the real story in the world economy is, that's
where it will remain. Moving information around is just playing with the
surplus production given to us by efficient manufacturing and agriculture.

If you want the real story on where things are headed, you'd best study things
like the baltic dry index, the yield curve and old economy indicators like
that. Measuring things in terms of eyeballs, mindshare and information flow is
as terminally ridiculous now as it was 10 years ago when this was discredited
the first time around.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
"The big indicator should be that the 3 foundations of the current system, as
described in the presentation - can all be exchanged for each other. Land for
Captial, Capital for Labour, Labour for Land. Try exchanging information for
any of these, you won't have much luck, unless we're talking trade secrets or
blackmail. Try exchanging open information for a piece of land and see how you
get on."

Governments give literally acres of land and tax breaks and concessions and
fall all over themselves when some techie company or other opens a call
center. That is literally trading little old information for all three. I give
you my domain knowledge and you give me labor (call center workers), land (um,
land), and capital (tax incentives/breaks/concessions, whatever you wanna call
it... cash).

Microsoft, aside from outsourced Flextronics-made XBox 360s and Zunes, make
information.

"Moving information around is just playing with the surplus production given
to us by efficient manufacturing and agriculture"

Moving information around is how you can use your Idaho bank card in
Bangalore. It doesn't make your bank worth less than Juanito the beet farmer
in Brazil.

~~~
brc
>Moving information around is how you can use your Idaho bank card in
Bangalore. It doesn't make your bank worth less than Juanito the beet farmer
in Brazil.

Thank you for proving my point. Without Juanito the beet farmer, and the
stereotypical mid-western farmer or Texan oil-man being efficient and
extracting a profit from their activities, there is no surplus. Without the
beets (and wheat,and beef, etc) none of us get fed. Without piles of invested
long-term capital from capital markets you don't have trans-ocean cables, and
without that you don't have any way of talking from Bangalore to Idaho.
Without the mines to dig up the minerals you don't have planes, and without
oil wells you don't have fuel, without pilots and baggage handlers you don't
get to go to Bangalore. So you wouldn't need your bankcard.

The whole reason we can actually get to Bangalore to use our bank card is
because those in primary production do it efficiently enough that not all of
us are involved in doing it. That's the surplus production (and thus, wealth)
that allows us to do these things.

Look, I'm not anti-tech in the slightest - this is how I make my living. I'm
just imploring tech people not to lose touch with that the industry really is,
not to let your fee lose touch with the ground and the real economy that we're
all here to support and improve.

------
chipsy
The "new" economy is actually one we already had, which has simply become more
powerful with the advent of the internet, and should have been present in the
slides at each step along economic progression. It's a gift economy where
capital is based on reputation and ability to share.

This is the same economy you use in local situations - with neighbors,
friends, co-workers - to exchange favors. It has the power to get you a job,
or to make a deal, or to elect a president, or any number of other things that
determine how the work is done and how the goods are dealt out. The
agricultural through industrial economies downplayed this form of economic
activity because property, ownership and employment proved more suitable for
creating an efficient market, but sharing has always been present and has
always been taught as a moral ideal. If we didn't participate in that economy,
we'd be quite a stand-offish, non-collaborative bunch. Nobody would trust each
other.

What we have now is the ability to make gift economies based on information
global in scale. The capital and labor necessary to start your (scarcity
economy oriented) startup are potentially sitting right here on HN, if you
know what to say and who to say it to. And PG and co. aren't making money off
of the site, but I'm sure they've benefited from it. It's this kind of value
that is really what's at stake in a successful info-business venture - the
ability of companies to monetize on top of the info or info infrastructures
ultimately isn't as important to the economy as the benefits accruing to all
of society from just having it around and operating smoothly; finding a
reasonable doorway from abundance currency to scarcity currency is what has
led to the variety of monetization concepts tried over the last decade(ads,
freemium, subscription, paywall, patronage...). This problem of monetization
is pervasive throughout information products and is at the root of the whole
IP debate: If there weren't money in trading information, would the incentives
to create still be there?

But the question that isn't answered by these slides is the big one: how to
balance ownership-based markets with gift-based ones. While the gift economy
is endlessly abundant, how will we distribute the work for the older markets
as they grow more efficient? Are there enough jobs to go around now, or do we
need to rearrange ourselves to sustain heightened unemployment? How do we make
everyone materially wealthy enough to be happy, and not destroy the planet in
doing so?

------
kiba
Metacurrency? The work is already done and it's called bitcoins.

Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency system with a very vibrant
community and several enterprises. It's also a system in which nodes trust no
one and verify all transaction in the network. <http://bitcoin.org>

Austrian school and other economic models are not obsolete at all. Their tools
just need to be shifted to analyze the information realm. In fact, Austro-
libertarians in general already reject intellectual property.

Indeed, the system paradigram is beginning to replace the old system of nation
states and coercion and replace them with anarchistic law system meditated by
computers. Computer code will be law.

The world is starting to look more like the _Diamond Age_ , everyday.

~~~
jeromec
Wait a minute. From looking over the bitcoin site, the process for currency
creation is based upon CPU processing power? The argument given for limiting
wealth creation is that, once bitcoin was used enough to have real value, the
expense for electricity to perform the calculation approaches a higher amount
than would be profitable by doing something else... First, not all computers
will utilize electricity uniformly to perform the "calculations". Some
computers are just horribly inefficient. Also, it's certainly possible to
construct more power efficient computing devices, and do so without even
talking about upcoming nano-technology and processing at the atomic scale
which would make electricity costs at a macro scale negligible for even the
most hard core computing. So right off the bat the bitcoin market does skew
its participants with non-uniformity, and a thesis that almost certainly won't
hold up within 50 years.

~~~
kiba
It is certainly possible to have more efficient computing devices, but then it
will only increase the difficulty of the problems. The network adjust.

More efficient computers will mine more bitcoins in the short run, but not any
more in the long run.

Even if it is extremely efficient, it is probably a lot easier to just trade
for bitcoins.

~~~
jeromec
But wouldn't the more efficient computers _always_ have an advantage over less
capable computers? In other words, for this system to be fair, even assuming
the electricity cost argument held up which I don't think it could, wouldn't
everyone participating need access to the same kind of computer? The required
calculation would be the same for every computer in the network, right?

~~~
kiba
What would you propose to make the system more "fair" without destroying the
value of bitcoin?

beside, the point of bitcoin is _not_ generating bitcoins. In fact, generating
bitcoins does nothing to create any value. Bitcoins become more valuable when
you can trade goods for it.

Some guys get more chance at making the correct calculation that get him new
bitcoins. Big deal. He get to buy 50 bitcoins worth of stuff. That's not a lot
considering the exchange rate. Maybe it's 4 dollars at most. Don't forget that
it won't be 50 bitcoins forever everytime you solve a problem. It will
eventually be reduced to half and then half until nothingness years later. 21
million bitcoin limit. No more can be generated.

Maybe it will be more rewarding to generate bitcoins when bitcoins are in
extremely high use, but that mean more competition for mining bitcoins. All
that does is increase the difficulty to the point of becoming unprofitable.

------
narrator
I think what's really going on is now that there is such an enormous amount of
slack in the system we have to find new ways to self-actualize. For instance,
because of all the cheap labor in China, manufacturing is now turning into an
esoteric geek hobby in the U.S with Maker Faire, etc. I see Unemployed people
on food stamps spending thousands of hours of their life in WOW and Farmville
pretending they have a job because the real economy doesn't need them.

Maybe I'm too cynical.. Any idealists want to cheer me up?

------
mark_l_watson
That was good - I bookmarked it to run through again. I really like the part
of this not being a recession, but the end of an old economy and the
transition to something new where 1/4 of what runs the economy (information)
can actually become more valuable as it is shared - not necessarily a scarce
resource.

------
thyrsus
"Something seems to be wrong here, and tells us APP_ERROR. prezi.com/support
might help."

Or not. Adobe flash player 10 under Fedora 12. Should I try from a Windows box
at work in the morning?

~~~
emanuer
Prezi notoriously does not work on Linux.

They didn't fix this since over a year now.

~~~
jallmann
Hm, seems to work for me on Ubuntu 10.4 (Flash 10,1,82,76)

------
drcode
Provocative, but too breezy to be convincing.

~~~
_delirium
Same reaction here. In particular, it doesn't explain why _this_ is a turning
point. We've been hearing about the "information economy" for 30 years now.
Why is 2010 suddenly its long-awaited triumph? The 1980s' argument was the
advent of the widely accessible personal computer, and the 1990s' argument was
the rollout of the internet to the general public. What's the 2010s' argument?

