I recently came across this presentation on my favorite link aggergation site - Metafilter.org:
Not only did the neat presentation blow me away, but also the content sent tingles through my spine.
I have been looking for a way to explain a lot of the things that have been racing through my mind lately.
Those thoughts have inspired me to leave behind the hipster world of brewing beer and refocus my attentions on my Big Hairy Audacious Goal of changing the economics of this planet, as we know it.
Most of my training has focused on an economic model assuming the classic 20th century industrial economic inputs of capital, labor and land. In all of my studies no one ever clearly broke down the previous economic paradigms into their basic fundamental inputs as neatly as did Arthur Brock:
Natural Economics - based solely on the input of land and managed with relationships of tribes and clans.
Agricultural Economics - the advent of the agricultural revolution labor input coupled with land created a new economy managed through religion and feudalism.
Industrial Economics - the creation of machines capital became a significant input and created the middle class.
So now we are at the beginnings of the information revolution where a fourth fundamental input is added – Information.
The three previous fundamental inputs are regarded is finite. This finiteness of inputs is the basis for Malthus’s assertion that economics is the “Dismal Science”.
Yet information is infinite.
An interesting concept that I once came across was the idea that the "only way to profit from information is to withhold it". Yet with the advances in information processing, the ability to pirate and share information has made this model all but obsolete.
How will our society change to manage this additional input?
What I get exited most about are all the possibilities.
