Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

web.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 74 posts

Re: Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

#41

Post by mhneu »

Krugman today wrote an article saying that America is at risk because some politicians are prioritizing their own power over the good of the country [0]. GOP politicians in the new cabinet and the White House are named.

Why was the OP posted to Hacker News today? Is it in response to Krugman's dire warning about American democracy and how the GOP is putting us all at risk?

Be careful about politics on Hacker News. The tech industry has an important role to play in media, and we know that the GOP has spent substantial sums to create bias in the media. [1] There is a strong incentive for the GOP to astroturf Hacker News and we should all be careful.

It's true that "reality often has a liberal bias" - and that's because the leaders of the GOP -- politicians and their big donors -- are trying to create their own reality, where they can cut taxes to keep more money in the pockets of the 0.01%. Use your own head when you see links like this.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/how-republics-end.... [1] http://www.salon.com/2008/09/24/mccain_letters/

edit: I expect the vocal right-leaning minority here to vote heavily; if you agree with the above and you're not a frequent voter please upvote posts here you agree with.

Re: Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

#42

Post by Booktrope »

addicted wrote: post #12
forgingahead wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Two mistakes" -- that is a satirical blog post right?

Big, Professional mistakes

He calls it "The Conscience of a Liberal" and then says "So yes, I’ve been wrong. Let those who are without error cast the first stone." Krugman is a good example of what's gone amiss with liberalism.

Even worse than his many errors, is his hypocrisy. He very loudly accused Amazon of being a "monopsony" during Amazon's most recent dust-up with the big publishers, on grounds that its market power would enable it to hurt consumers, although he acknowledged, Amazon hadn't used its economic power that way. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amaz...

The impetus for Krugman's column was, Amazon's resistance to big publishers using their market power to overprice ebooks. Krugman was on the side of the big publishers for obvious reasons I think. Krugman's own widely-assigned economics texts provide some of the clearest examples of big publishers using monopsony to overprice ebooks. His publisher, presumably with Krugman's support, sells ebooks of these texts for $100 - $200 a copy. A great example of mmonopsony - because students are assigned Krugman's books and therefore don't have choice, Krugman's publisher extracts monopsony profits. This isn't just a little convenient opportunism -- as Krugman surely knows, overinflated textbook prices are a significant burden on many students, who are leaving university with huge debt. Yet, Krugman goes along with this exploitation, and presumably banks very large royalties for himself at student's expense.

I say presumably a couple of times, because I've not seen anything from Krugman explaining or apologizing for the prices of his own books and the way this exploits students.

Re: Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

#43

Post by Eridrus »

RodericDay wrote: post #20

I much prefer Ha-Joon Chang's "the washing machine changed the world more than the internet" [0], which I think fares a lot better than Krugman's claims. > When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago. Of course, the internet is great – I can now google and find the exact location of this restaurant on the edge of Liverpool or whatever. But when you look at…

On that note, maybe we should not be looking for the economic impact it has had on the US, but the impact it has had on India, China, etc.

I also wonder what we would find if we measured the productivity gains of the washing machine; I'm not sure we would see the rise that economists want to see from computing technology.

Re: Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

#44

Post by GCA10 »

colordrops wrote: post #30

Despite his impressive pedigree, Paul Krugman is more of a political mouthpiece than an economist. His regular opinion pieces in the New York times or frequently abrasive and wrong.

My general sense is that academic superstars who decide to opine on world events generally do slightly better than their Hollywood counterparts ... but not much

On team academia, Linus Pauling, Edward Teller, Bertrand Russell, Paul Krugman, etc. On team Hollywood, Jane Fonda, Clint Eastwood, Al Franken, Madonna, etc. Being tremendously prominent in one domain has only a loose correlation with expertise in something else quite different.

Re: Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

#45

Post by wmeredith »

mempko wrote: post #9

While he is wrong about the impact of the internet economically. He isn't wrong that technology progress has been disappointing. When you grow up believing you will be driving flying cars and seeing robots help you around the house, how else are you supposed to feel? It is only now that computing power has started to enable old AI techniques such as neural nets, which were once impractical are now starting to be reas…

> When you grow up believing you will be driving flying cars and seeing robots help you around the house

I feel like this is more a failure of critical thinking than anything else. There has been nonsense about flying cars on the cover of Popular Science since I was in diapers (early 1980's). I am 36 and I think the the progression of technology during my lifetime has been amazing. If you could travel back 20 years and show someone a Google search on an iPhone they would be gobsmacked. (Or maybe they'd just say, but "what about my flying car?")

Re: Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

#46

Post by matt4077 »

colordrops wrote: post #30

Despite his impressive pedigree, Paul Krugman is more of a political mouthpiece than an economist. His regular opinion pieces in the New York times or frequently abrasive and wrong.

This article is posted here to embarrass Krugman, but if you look at GDP growth over time, you'd think there should be a kink in the graph /somewhere/ to account for the economic benefits of the internet.

It's possible that growth would have been even more anaemic without the internet, but that's hard to argue from the data.

Re: Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

#47

Post by wmeredith »

jokoon wrote: post #29

I'm still curious to know what are the "Internet Economic Impact". This article was written before the net bubble. So far all I see in the economics of internet is netflix replacing DVDs, twitter/facebook/online presence (which is advertising, which means little to me), and... that's it. Other domains like online gaming are not that great in term of economic impact. Amazon is closing book and movie stores. I can see…

Go talk to your cable provider or local newspaper about how the internet hasn't had much economic impact.

Re: Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

#48

Post by tacon »

Booktrope wrote: post #42
addicted wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big, Professional mistakes

He calls it "The Conscience of a Liberal" and then says "So yes, I’ve been wrong. Let those who are without error cast the first stone." Krugman is a good example of what's gone amiss with liberalism. Even worse than his many errors, is his hypocrisy. He very loudly accused Amazon of being a "monopsony" during Amazon's most recent dust-up with the big publishers, on grounds that its market power would enable it to hu…

You are confusing monopsony and monopoly. Monopsony is often a government buyer, say of prisons or aircraft carriers, and the monospony puts the buyer in a stronger position. In a monopoly, the power is with the seller.

Re: Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

#49

Post by snrplfth »

hyperpape wrote: post #38

While this article is probably wrong (I don't know what the economic impact of the fax machine was, but I suspect a lot smaller than the Internet), we should probably all be asking ourselves whether the economic impact of our industry is really all that big. Looking at the profit of companies like Google and Facebook overstates the impact for them. They are making tons of money, but a lot of that is just a shift in t…

One must also ask, how much of it is consumer surplus. In just the same way as a disease going away reduces the economic activity associated with managing that disease, information technology and the internet have done away with many previously necessary activities, in the process of creating an overall improvement - potentially "shrinking" GDP, even while it delivers substantial benefits. What is instantaneous worldwide communication worth? What would it have been worth in 1967? It's so common and important now - but it's also very cheap, so it doesn't show up significantly in many calculations of economic production.

Re: Krugman: Internet’s Economic Impact No Greater Than Fax Machine (1998)

#50

Post by snrplfth »

matt4077 wrote: post #46
colordrops wrote: post #30

Despite his impressive pedigree, Paul Krugman is more of a political mouthpiece than an economist. His regular opinion pieces in the New York times or frequently abrasive and wrong.

This article is posted here to embarrass Krugman, but if you look at GDP growth over time, you'd think there should be a kink in the graph /somewhere/ to account for the economic benefits of the internet. It's possible that growth would have been even more anaemic without the internet, but that's hard to argue from the data.

Well, you could say that the internet was not a totally unique thing in itself, but just another (big) forward step in the ever-improving telecommunications sector, which had already seen the expansion of telegraphs, radio, telephones, and so on, and would also have represented big improvements in communication capacity.
Post reply on HN