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ShayBanerjeeFirstEssay 3 - 01 Oct 2015 - Main.ShayBanerjee
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| | | All of this goes back to what we learned about political economy during the 19th century. Eben claims that in the digital universe the marginal cost of knowledge production and distribution is zero. The marginal cost, of course, is not zero, any more than the marginal cost of my spending the next three weeks lying on Jones Beach is zero. The cost in both cases is my time. In human economies, labor is the fundamental basis of value, and that value is expressed in time. Any time we spend playing NetWorldGame? or analyzing Volkswagon software is time that we are not working to accumulate the resources necessary to subsist. That might not be a problem for the predominantly upper middle-class white male population of techies whose writings we have been reading for this class, but it is a problem for most of the human race. | |
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< | To be blunt, the problem is production, not consumption. All across the world, people are selling their labor time to socially unproductive enterprise in order to survive. This is why Eben's final argument - that redistribution does not solve the problem of growth - is also wrong. Wealth redistribution encourages growth because it provides the poor with the freedom and time to pursue socially productive ends. In the mid-20th century, when, according to Eben, America was still "creating," we did not have any of the software toys he talks about. People who had the time to learn about social problems and solve them did so the old-fashioned way. What we did have back then was a substantially more equitable society than we do today. | >
> | To be blunt, the problem is production, not consumption. All across the world, people are selling their labor time to socially unproductive enterprise in order to subsist. This is why Eben's final argument - that redistribution does not solve the problem of growth - is also wrong. Wealth redistribution encourages growth because it provides the poor with the freedom and time to pursue socially productive ends. In the mid-20th century, when, according to Eben, America was still "creating," we did not have any of the software toys he talks about. People who had the time to learn about social problems and solve them did so the old-fashioned way. What we did have back then was a substantially more equitable society than we do today. | | | Conclusion |
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