Convergences

Can Science Rule Society?

The Obama administration has been greeted with enthusiasm by scientists who see the potential for “research-based policy.” Reason, not ideology, will govern. The New Scientist, among other zines, headlines “Let Science Rule: the Rational Way to Run Societies.” (May 28, p. 40-43) This is part of a larger theme: Behavioral economics is taking off.

Free Association about Chrome OS

Last week, Google announced its new netbook Web-focused operating system -- Chrome OS, to match its browser. The OS will be open source, a variation on Linux, so Google will be able to tap into the strength of that community from the get-go, and of course free ride on the  work supported by IBM, HP, and the other tech companies who fund Linux.

There is a lot of cross-talk in the press and web about how this is or is not a deadly or minor threat to Microsoft's core Windows business, done with or without deliberate malice by Google, and how it is a disruptive or minor innovation that can be extended up the value chain (unless it is not), and how Microsoft must be very worried or perhaps highly amused.

The day before, I was at Google's DC office to hear Chris Anderson talk about his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. One point he made is that there is a big psychological distance between "free" and even a trivial cost and that the business models of the future must cater to this. This does indeed seem to be a pre-occupation of the tech world, which thus assumes that Google's free OS should sweep the board, except of course for the power of those Microsoft people who seem to cheat by charging for their products.

DeLong on Zittrain

The Fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books is now available. CRB is, in my opinion, the most consistently thoughtful and rewarding opinion journal in existence, and anyone who does not subscribe is missing out on a good thing.

The issue has my review of Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet -- and How to Stop It. Among my points:

[O]ne must realize that it is not a stand-alone work. Zittrain is part of a movement of cyber-world legal academics centered at Harvard and Stanford, but with outposts at Berkeley, Duke, Yale, and other major schools. Its creed is drawn from works by, inter alia, Lawrence Lessig of Stanford, who has written a series of books on the open internet and the deleterious impacts of intellectual property; Yochai Benkler of Harvard, who argues that "social production" by peers acting on communitarian rather than market incentives constitutes a new mode of production that will rival capitalism; Tim Wu of Columbia, who says Wikipedia "is best known for popularizing the concept of network neutrality"; and William Fisher of Harvard, who wrote a book on sources of support for intellectual creativity in a world where property rights are both undesirable and unenforceable.

The movement can be characterized by five core sentiments, which include communitarian and democratic idealism, disdain for property rights (especially intellectual property), antipathy toward markets, social libertarianism, and hostility to a group of corporate enemies-among them the content companies (especially the music industry), the telecom carriers (Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast), and Microsoft.

My judgment of the movement is skeptical: 

Free and easy with the fundamentals of economic thought, blind to the illuminations of history, and enamored with the wisdom of crowds (which easily turns into the madness of mobs), the movement floats off into abstractions about net neutrality, universal generativity, communitarian sharing, and semiotic democracy.

(Come on, Jim -- stop the pussy-footing and tell us what you really think!)

The review will be available on the Claremont website in a few weeks -- or you can do what you should do anyway and subscribe.