Comments: /OpEd/virtual/technet/An_E-conomy.html

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An E-conomy?

-- Bradford DeLong (delong@econ.berkeley.edu), May 04, 2000

Answers

Response to /OpEd/virtual/technet/An_E-conomy.html

>This is a million-fold increase in forty years-- a thirty-five percent per year increase in information processing power.

I think you're going to drastically overestimate if you use an information-theoretic definition here; particularly if you analogise to horsepower. The amount of "information" in the normal use of the word per bit of information- theoretic information has fallen very rapidly -- ASCII gives you almost one bit per bit, a huge great javascripted website must be heading for one bit of real information per kilobyte delivered. Whereas I don't think anything comparable has happened with regard to horsepower.

And you don't need investment banking to build large factories -- the Europeans built them using bank lending.

cheers

dd

-- Daniel Davies (daniel.davies@flemings.com), May 04, 2000.


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