Continuations

One key lesson from COVID19 is that we need a lot more decentralization. This is especially true when the center is as inept at managing the crisis as the US federal government has proven to be. For example, the power of agencies such as the CDC and the FDA has turned out to be problematic, e.g. in giving guidance on mask wearing or trying to increase the availability of testing (both central to the road back). This is not just a critique of current leadership but rather of the accretion of e...

One of my favorite questions to ask business students is why companies require external financial capital (equity or debt). Answers tend to turn quickly towards some need to invest, e.g. in developing software or building a plant. But that doesn’t fully answer the question. Why? Because what if the investment in development can be paid for by customers ahead of time? Well in that case there is no need for external investment. This is of course something we now see in the real world via Kickst...

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...