Author Archive

Mistaking the instrument for the music (or, Why having children is always immoral)

John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1955 book The Great Crash, 1929 is apparently a great read right about now. It’s among Amazon’s bestsellers and was among those featured in this week’s Economist. I haven’t read it yet (I will), but the decade-plus of reviews on Amazon were worth a read in themselves as the US economy has hit its troughs and heights. From what I have read, the central thesis is that speculating for speculation’s sake is what led to to the 1929 crash (and subsequent depression) – which is no doubt why it’s resonating with so many folks currently. Stepping back to take a neutral view of the components of our current economic system, I see that the very thing that makes the creation of value possible within the system is the same thing that destroys it. It’s like a group

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Making room for generative thinking

Catching up on NPR’s Planet Money podcasts while climbing Telegraph Hill early this morning, I was struck by how much energy the producers put into normalizing the extraordinary economic events we’re currently experiencing. Each episode doggedly tracks the TED spread, explains the structure of bailouts and asks the leading economist du jour innocent-sounding questions like “where is all the money?” The kind of thinking that drives Planet Money interviewers to seek out established economists, bankers, politicians is process-oriented thinking to preserve some existing life context. The unspoken driver of the discussions is to figure out ways to normalize extraordinary economic events, so we the audience don’t have to face the unimaginable alternative of economic collapse. SciFi author and social commentator Bruce Sterling had a great quote in a post on the state of the world in 2009: “When you can’t

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Thoughts on the practical applicability of “freeconomics”

Stephen Colbert was dryly amusing as usual lampooning Lawrence Lessing on the Colbert Report the other night. If you’re not familiar with Lessing, he is the leading advocate of abolishing outdated aspects of current copyright laws in favor of Creative Commons licensing in light of the detachable, portable and remixable reality of the online world and people’s creative motivation to participate in it. Colbert’s rapid-debate schtick gets Lessing to explain that the economics of the creative commons are people want to contribute to sites like Flickr for free and Flickr makes money by selling ads to them. Lessing calls this an aspect of the “hybrid economy.” What Lessing gets right with his “hybrid economy” notion is that there is an intrinsic motivation for creativity and generating something new among people. There is a satisfaction contributors to open-source software get when

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The power of decentralized, emergent networks

2008 will be remembered as the year when the world, especially Americans and Europeans, got the 411 on how the global economic system really works – well, kind of. In reality, financial instruments and ways of keeping track of them have become so convoluted that I’m not sure anyone can make sense of it all. I am sure, however, that the current economic system isn’t fixable at this point – it’s just a question of time before it completely unravels. The good news is that the system was really only working for a small percentage of the population, anyway. We have the chance to challenge our assumptions about the goals of an economic system and create one that works better. The online marketplace doesn’t require that we figure this out in advance. It doesn’t follow linear rules of order or

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