Peter Swire, Professor of Law at the Ohio State, gave a presentation "Consumers as Producers" attempting to take a more economics-based view of the ideas in Benkler's Wealth of Networks.
His critiques:
Shift to non-market is not proven, likely far overstated
- Open source is shifting to market-based companies
- Social and hobbyist evolve to market functions (Jon Postel to ICANN; Web 2.0 - target of ads & PR; and the Internet itself has evolved from non-commercial to commercial)
- Economist would agree with the decline in cost of producing information goods and services, but that just shifts the supply curve way out -- we will get more production from factory owners or their equivalent. This may or may not
- Occam's razor. Markets will likely explain it all in time, not requiring a radical shift to non-market relationships.
Pragmatic reasons to deploy the economics-based approach to consumers & producers
- Need to persuade policymakers and business people to achieve our broadband Internet goals.
Benkler's rebuttal: Market production is considered desirable policy. Is your claim the result of our policies?
My take: Since Paul Romer, economics now takes ideas into account (as opposed to treating them as external (exogenous). I'm not an economist, but I suspect these two should put their arguments in the context of new economic theory, rather than markets as understood by Adam Smith.
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