« Animal rights stuff I don't get | Main | Will fixing global warming be good for us? »
July 1, 2009
Does information really want to be free?
Malcolm Gladwell says there is no iron law of information's price falling to zero in Priced to Sell. That reminded me of a major issue I had with Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where free energy and immortality (the ability to be reincarnated from software) had combined to eliminate all other scarcity on earth. In reading the book I couldn't escape that land and information need not be free in such a world. In fact, just as cheap food has made other things like acting and teaching much more expensive, Doctorow's hypothesis that free energy and long life expectancy would lead to the end of scarcity seems backwards. I expect that such a situation would cause the remaining scarce goods to become much more expensive. A sort of Baumol's cost disease on steroids.
It is impossible to know how the death of newspapers and the growth of electronic books will change the face of information distribution. Perhaps the price of information and entrainment will fall to zero, and only non-profits and volunteers will create any. That's the story that the futurists seem to like, but that is hardly the only possible one. Maybe that was clearly the right narrative for music, but I'm skeptical that is the right model for video and print.
Posted by OneEyedMan at July 1, 2009 8:47 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)