Re: a false dichotomy: economic vs. political issues [was:Darwin's God]

[Doyle Saylor <doylesaylor@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
On Mar 10, 2007, at 9:16 AM, Jim Devine wrote:

> Perhaps it shows a weakness of
> character, but some with really strong character moved toward strident
> dogmatism. Isolated intellectuals tend to have weak characters

Doyle;
Over generalization about 'character'.  Otherwise very interesting
response to Yoshie.  I would say that much of your economic thinking is
not about Information Technology or the economics that underlie the
development of that force in the economy.  Whereas Michael P is
extremely sensitive to the issue and has written a great deal about
that.  So for example I go to someone like Clay Shirky to better
understand the economic development of say the Semantic Web.  The
massive increase of information production from 1970 of about half an
exobyte per year to about 160 exobytes per year now is extraordinary
increase raw information.  Exobyte was enough to describe the whole
production of knowledge in humans from the beginning of language till
1900.

The clash between types of business plans leads me to the conclusion
that a global state really requires a culture based upon a network like
system of information production.  Rather than the historical model
(based upon the business of print media) that has dominated capitalism
up to now.  The struggle between business models in Intellectual
Property whether in agriculture, knowledge media or what have you have
to do with production of community versus object property.  This is at
it's heart exactly what drove Marx to unite the 'working class' into a
single entity of all or whole interests.

Yoshie takes a tack of interest in the community related organizational
structures that emerge in the state.  That has an IT economic related
outcome.  That is state media is either communal or private production
for profit.  It is not easy to translate that into terms of economic
analysis, but as I note above with Clay Shirky a great deal of IT
oriented thinkers in economics do consider that the communal Sunni, Shi
i knowledge production has a very interesting economic aspect.  In
terms of IT.  Religions are workshops for producing communal knowledge,
i.e. emotion as wells text structure in the community.  The models are
more or LESS able to build community structures capable of 'uniting'
the community in the sense the Marx meant working class.
Doyle