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> The "disintermediation" effects
> <insert blather about a "geodesic writing economy" as desired>
:-). You rang?
<Hold on, my Rapturous New Age Smile needs a little super glue to stay
put...>
> may be
> very real, but the effect of widespread distribution of words is that
> Tom Clancy, Stephen King, and that Rowling woman ("Harry Potter") can
> earn tens of millions a year while even most _published_ novels never
> make any reasonable profit.
>
> Some call this the "best seller" effect. Economists look to "flash
> crowd" and "winner take all" explanations. Several books have covered
> this recently.
Oddly enough, I agree. I think that what will happen, when we have
instantaneous cash settled auction markets for bits on the wire, code,
music, equity, debt, whatever, is that we'll have *more* volitility, and
the same thing will happen faster. Frankly, there will be *more*
instantaneous economic rent effects for productive people who do the best
new stuff, and that, frankly, it'll be a good thing.
That is, the biggest transactions will be the *first* transactions in the
value chain, and not somewhere in the middle, and those kinds of
transactions will replace advances, or at the least, whatever loans that
will be made against those transactions will be by financial
intermediaries, instead of production production intermediaries (record
companies, publishers, movie production companies) who then
transfer-price those costs farther down the value-chain.
Finally, when someone stops being productive, they'll *stop* making
money, and faster, and, hopefully, they'll have investments to tide them
over until they do something new and useful, or at least in demand in the
market, once again. To beat Mr. Kesey a bit, everyone will "star in
their own movie", or at least have the economic career of a movie star,
anyway.
This is, frankly, what America is about, anyway. The people who are very
rich, right now, usually don't stay that way for long, and the same thing
is true for the very poor. Their kids certainly don't tend to stay in the
same "class", no matter what the liberal press says, and it was that way,
historically, with or without inheritance laws. Rich people usually got
rich, and went broke, in a hurry, and rich kids usually didn't stay that
way very long.
So, I think we're going to get the same thing, only faster now that
information, and money, can move increasingly faster. Instead of
"Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations", it will probably
turn into "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three product cycles." Cool.
:-).
On the other hand, a lot of the things that we're paying people to do now
as some kind of perpetual sinicure, will, in fact, be done cheaper by
people and machines who will auction their services rather than get paid
as a matter of course. The result is that all us mundanes :-) will do
more different kinds of stuff in our lives, and, correspondingly, we'll
will get more stuff cheaper.
Finally, If it doesn't work out that way, of course, it won't happen.
That being the peculularly circular definition of progress, after all...
Cheers,
RAH
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--
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
