Continuations

In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. With that set of technologies (planting, irrigation, domestication of animals, etc.), invented roughly 10,000 years ago, the constraint shifted from food to land in what became the Agrarian Age. Then only a couple ...

In an information sessions for Congress, Peter Van Valkenburgh used my favorite analogy comparing crypto tokens to tickets at a fair ground. And William Mougayar has a new post about tokens where he specifically refers to them as “privately issued currency.” No matter how you think about tokens, there is now a great interest in understanding why and how their prices are determined in the market. The trivial answer of course is: supply and demand. But what exactly is the supply? As it turns ou...

Yesterday I woke up to the news that Bengt Holmström was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics along with Oliver Hart. I have had the good fortune to have had Bengt as one of my PhD thesis advisors at MIT, together with my thesis chair, Erik Brynjolfsson and Birger Wernerfelt. All three of them were incredibly generous with their time, which is even more remarkable given that it became increasingly clear that I was not going to pursue an academic career. Bengt’s work on incentives is hugely im...

This is part of my series of posts thinking about a coming age of abundance. The main thrust of my arguments will be that abundance will be a feature of the physical world, but I would be the first to admit that we are a long way off from that. In the meantime though, we can look to the online world for some clues as to what abundance might look like. Online (at least on the margin), the cost of resources is already sufficiently close to zero so as to not matter. One of the interesting possib...

The Wired cover story on “The Web is Dead? A Debate” has in fact caused an intense debate of the question, taking place – of course – on the web. It may be seen as somewhat ironic that on just the following day we get two pieces of news from Google that would point in the other direction: a demo of the future of browser games and a Chrome OS tablet together with Verizon (aside: sure didn’t take long after their joint pronouncement on net neutrality). Much has been made of the potential shift ...

There was an editorial in the New York Times over the weekend talking about the likelihood of bankruptcies among companies that have gone through buyouts during the time when credit was flowing too freely. I agree with the column that this is highly likely as we are facing a significant slowdown in economic activity and these companies have way too much leverage (and given the credit crunch, no real option to refinance). Why did the companies wind up with so much leverage? That reminded me th...