Reddit reviews Free: The Future of a Radical Price

This is pretty critical. There was a book written about this called Free: The future of a radical price.

https://www.amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp/1401322905

The whole book could probably fit in a single chapter but it's an interesting read.

People stop thinking when you say Free. There's no cognitive cost to making the choice to act if it's "free."

Since the inception of the internet, the old media business model was doomed to fail. News, music, movies, games, etc.

Yet, as time marches on they have 3 options:

• Die out (see newspapers)
  
• Evolve (see gaming industry, DRM, digital distribution, micro-transactions)
  
• Suck the teet dry, which is what this legislation is attempting to do. certain corporations have been unable, or refused to modify their existing and failing business model, and thus, must lobby to find news ways to force consumers into less choice, less user-generated content, less freedom.
  
  Paraphrasing Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price, once something becomes digital and available on the internet, its price drives towards zero.

> I don't know any respected economist

Yes, even a completely destroyed position like this cannot be eliminated by your methods. You have eliminated it by other methods that you do not acknowledge -- that you fail to acknowledge so completely that you think your 'repeated demonstrations' have any bearing on the elimination of this position.

> How is that a straw man?

It isn't. It's a description of the process you immediately re-describe. Let's re-read what I said:

> by presenting carefully falsifiable straw men instead of your real position for attack, an empirical 'economist' can persevere in nonsense beliefs like "a higher minimum wage would benefit workers" - and just always be working on his next straw man

and restate it for you:

1. an 'economist' says, hm, I think a higher minimum wage would benefit workers - why, because they'll get more money! Makes sense.
   
   
2. But I can't propose this by itself - that would be 'unscientific' - so I will instead propose a carefully falsifiable assertion, test it, and then --
   
   
3. hum, it failed. Well, maybe, uh, maybe I need to control for, uh --
   
   The original position is a real economic proposition -- just a very wrong one, assailable on its own terms. The unending stream of psuedoeconomic model-assertions and predictions, what this 'economist' regards as the exercise of his science, are the straw men I refer to. They are not the real position; to propose them or to attack them is not to rebut it.
   
   > That's the very essence of scientific inquiry.
   
   By which you mean: this is what you think physicists do. Misplaced envy doesn't make a science.
   
   > And who has said "we need a new economics"
   
   Everybody says this all the time. Austrians never say this. To say that we need a 'whole new economics' flows naturally from a view of economics as a process of discovering new things to control for, to make your pet idea work: why shouldn't you also 'control for' the political party in power, or the presence or absense of dense information networks, or computers, or mass democracy? We have 'network effects' all of the sudden, so naive marginal analysis no longer suffices! Maybe socialism will work after everything is free?
   
   > "there would have been no great depression without the Fed" are unfalsifiable
   
   This is an obviously problematic counterfactual, but it has this obvious premise: the Austrian threory of the business cycle. So attack that.
   
   > "banks create money out of nothing" is unfalsifiable
   
   This is, depending on the context, an empirical statement about extant banks or an economic proposition about some kind of bank. But, here: start a fractional-reserve bank, accept some deposits, lend out more money than you have (at a 'fraction' of your 'reserve', say?), and then direct your brain at what you've just done. Does BoA also do this?
   
   > "well [Alcoa] was not a REAL monopoly."
   
   Here's me doing you, talking with and then about J. Random Economist:
   
   ME: Milk is so expensive! Why can't they just be forced to sell it at $0.20?
   
   JRE: But then you'd have a shortage.
   
   ME (to a bystander): *guffaw*, can you believe this guy? "Then you'd have a shortage"! Unbelievable! There's already not enough milk! What an ass!

>But to have an impact on the macro level you don't need only to have a gap on individual productivity, you'd also need that the relative price between capital and labor in all sectors to favor capital accumulation, adding a lot more variables to be accounted for.

Yeah, and as much as I've looked at the question of technological unemployment I haven't seen anyone capture all the complex dynamics into a theory. It's all pretty hand wavy based off a few charts and tables. The best source I read though was the book [The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future by Martin Ford] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1448659817).

What I've come away believing though is that when you look across the jobs in different sectors most are susceptible to technological unemployment and few are new jobs created by new technology. I'm a software engineer, and my industry creates a lot of value with relatively stingy hiring practices.

The industrial and information revolutions killed many manual and paper pushing jobs. The growth in robotics, which already dominates a lot manufacturing, is moving into service industries very quickly and filling the void between the industrial and information revolutions.

>If you mean by that that people won't need to look for jobs then you'd still be in full-employment, they're just droping out of the work force.

True, my terminology was poor.

>Can you elaborate?

If technological unemployment is one of the major macroeconomic issues in our economy, then investment in technology may cause short term job growth for a relatively small number of the highly skilled but long term job destruction for the less skilled. Jobless growth of the economy. There are big exceptions like the surge of jobs laying fibre for the Internet though. I liked Chris Anderson's book [Free: The Future of a Radical Price] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1401322905) that talked about how technology removed inefficiencies in the print and music industries, created a race to the bottom, and destroyed lots of revenue and jobs.

Read the book free by Chris Anderson. (It's not free in dead-tree form but you can get it free in other ways.) It covers this sort of social value versus monetary value rather well.

In the specific case of Reddit, I imagine that most people participate because they get value from the interesting links, and the 'payment' of an upvote is given exactly to encourage similar links. The upvoter does get value from it -- it's just a social value rather than a monetary value.

I haven't read SuperFreakonomics yet, I'm sure it's more of the same. The only other one I'm familiar with is Free, by Chris Anderson. I'm particularly into it because I do some stuff on filesharing. It's got a couple of different perspectives on up-and-coming issues.

If you're the book reading type, try reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Then be innovative.

I'm inclined to believe Chris Anderson's theory on "Free" - the value of digital files is nothing. If you have more time than money, there is very little to stop you from obtaining unsanctioned digital copies of songs. Or, if you have more money than time, you can go to iTunes and spend 99 cents for the convenience of not having to wade through dreck to find a song on a P2P network.

Build 1000 true fans, then find a model that works.

Maybe a subscription model like I've seen be successful. Real fans pay $x/month and get guaranteed regular new releases and a bunch of extras. Indie artist Matthew Ebel is doing this, for instance.