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

"Hexapodia" Is the Key Insight: by Noah Smith & Brad DeLong

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>

Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe