Market Failure, Dead Ahead

Columbia University's Eli Noam has seen the future of the information economy and it ain't pretty. In fact it is "a volatile, cyclical, unstable mess." So bad in fact, that governments should consider deliberately encouraging low-tech industries so the entire economy will not be volatile, cyclical, and unstable.

Two thoughts. One, who said things were going to neat and tidy? Flooding the globe with info was destined to bring more creative brains into the wild mix of human activity. Nobody said it would be easy to figure out what everyone would do with more information.

Second, if things are so bad and getting worse, why not just go ahead and toss off all the outcome-distorting regs on the information sector like must-carry rules, universal service mandates, and the like? Indeed, close down the FCC and just go home and await the End. Or are we supposed to start work on our iron smelters straight away?

Comments

[JimInNoVA]

Iron? Who said anything about iron? Iron is "a volatile, cyclical, unstable mess." We have to go back to fig leaves.

[Warren]

Luddites; Wrong from the beginning. Having failed to learn anything in the past hundred years, still wrong. When today's high tech becomes tomorrows obsolete, they will still be afraid and they will still be wrong.

[Swamp Justice]

volatile, cyclical, unstable? That's just the free market working its innovative magic. 🙂 Sure, it's a bumpy ride, but it's better than the alternative!

[Economist]

Do you really have to be a moron to be an academic economist? I'm seeing little evidence to the contrary.

[Kevin Carson]

Noam's proposal is typical of the kind of Rube Goldberg concatenations of government intervention liberals advocate. When faced with a problem caused by government intervention and market distortion, what do they propose? Eliminating existing government interventions that cause the problem? No--that would be logical! They propose MORE government intervention to correct the effects of existing government intervention.

I guess this guy never heard of DARPA, or the universal connectivity charge.

[Kevin Carson]

BTW, this sounds an awful lot like massively subsidizing tobacco farmers, and then imposing a massive tax on cigarettes to deter consumption. I guess the administrative cost keeps the people who collect the taxes and disburse the funds in work, at least.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Clearly, we need to work harder to ban the future.

[Ruthless]

Why do words like volotile, chaotic, anarchic, etc. frighten people so?

Or maybe they don't? Perhaps they only frighten the people who say or write them.

For example, all these gay people getting married in San Fran. Oooh. I'm soo scared. "Real" marriage must be defended... tradition, boredom, stasis, don't you know.

There is only one habitat available to sentient beings: the edge of chaos which is to say, complexity. The physical habitat has to be inside the thinnest of skins on a small globe whizzing through deep space.

Chaos is getting smaller while stasis/death/boredom is expanding. So existence is a game of musical chairs with the likes of Eli Noam losing and being condemned to stand over in stasis... forever.

[shane]

"a volatile, cyclical, unstable mess." = a dynamic, prosperous, free society.

Wow, yet another central planner attacking markets.

[NotNhilist]

Order is the crutch of a small mind. Genius can handle chaos.