Group items tagged

Stimulus payments to consumers is analogous to dumping frosting onto a cake mix, before the ingredients have been mixed and baked. All elements of the economy, from raw materials, to intermediate goods, to consumer goods, must return to a supply-demand balance before the economy can gain Krugman’s “traction.” That necessarily takes time, because mining companies and other producers of basic raw materials have time scales for increased output and employment that are very different from the time scales of intermediate goods producers and consumer goods manufacturers.

Keynesian economics, as expounded by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is essentially a black box theory. Stand on the outside of the economic box and dump into it endless baskets of inflationary fiat money, and things supposedly just happen automatically inside the black box to produce permanent prosperity and near zero unemployment.

The US exhibit included the: McCormack Reaper, Colt Revolver, a 16,400 lb hunk of zinc, unpickable locks, a model of Niagara Falls and a piano that could be played by 4 people at the same time.

The Egyptian Court featured the hieroglyphic "Rosetta Stone"

Items on display included: the Jacquard loom, an envelope machine that could handle 60 pieces a minute, Lucifer matches, tools, steam engines, kitchen appliances, steel-making displays, powdered graphite in the form of yellow pencils, McCormack Reaper, Bowie knives, Swiss watches, a stuffed elephant, 40 foot scale model of the London docks with 1600 miniature ships, a knife with 1851 blades, prototype submarine, farm equipment, electric clocks, washing machine, false teeth, artificial limbs, chewing tobacco, centrifugal pump, Jacquard lace machine, steam-press, camerae-obscurae, Caloric Engine, Colt's Pistols, Prouty and Mears' Plows, American Bridges, household furniture made of coal, rhubarb champagne, artificial arms and legs, two chairs designed by Mr. Carl Leistler, centrifugal impellers (pumps). 

I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode "commons-based peer-production," to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

"What we think is good for the consumer doesn't matter - it's what the consumer thinks is good that matters."

When you link the consumer to the manufacturer there are huge areas of opportunity

It's the internet, of course, that makes crowdsourcing possible - on a global scale.