In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt contemplates an important puzzle: that, in the 1990s, violent crime in the US fell suddenly and steeply.  

Levitt reviews, and finds wanting, the usual explanations. He says the drop in violent crime cannot be exhaustively explained by any one, or combination, of the following factors:

Innovative policing strategies

Increased reliance on prisons

Changes in crack and other drug markets

Aging of the population

Tougher gun control laws

Strong economy

Increased number of police

All other explanations (increased use of capital punishment, concealed-weapons laws, gun buybacks, and others)

Levitt has his own, now famous, account: legalized abortion diminished the population most likely to commit crime, specifically teens brought into the world by reluctant mothers. (2005:139)

I think we are still missing something. Call it the “esteem” or “Goffman” explanation. 

As Levitt points out, we are talking not about crime but violent crime (2005: 121). Lesser crimes, burglary, robbery and auto-theft, for instance, have a “direct financial motivation.”  Violent crimes (assault, rape, homicide) appear to have an extra-economic motivation. They damage not only the material interests of the victim, but something more. Victims of assault and rape say that they feel diminished and even humiliated, and that this immaterial loss creates injury every bit as grievous as the loss of money and possessions.

Violent crime is a crime against esteem, as much as it is a crime against property.  (By “esteem,” I mean the value attacked to the individual by the individual and by others. We could also call this “face,” as Goffman did.)  And it is as a crime against esteem that it is sometimes committed.  This is to say that the diminishment and humiliation felt by the victim is no mere accident of the crime, but the very outcome the criminal sometimes intends.  

If violent crime began to fall in the 1990s, the anthropological question is this: why was the need to commit crimes against esteem felt less urgently than before? What had changed? 

To answer this question, we must answer several smaller questions. First, we must ask who would commit violent crime as a crime against esteem.  I think violent crime is mostly like to come from those who have suffered attacks upon esteem of their own.  Those who live in poverty are often subject to belittling stigma and stereotype. (These are “violent crimes” of an endemic, slow motion, rhetorical kind.) 

When committed by this group, violent crimes may be seen to have an element of retribution and, possibly, redistribution.  Victims are punished for having so much esteem when the criminal has so little. It seems to me unlikely that the criminal also hopes for redistribution. The criminal doesn’t get to “keep” the esteem he/she “takes” from a victim. (This is of course an ethnographic question that should not be answered from an armchair.)  But something like redress has been accomplished. The criminal might not have more esteem, but the victim does at least have less.

What, then, has changed for those who come from poverty, that they should feel the need to commit crimes against esteem less urgently. I believe the answer to this question comes from the single most important development in musical taste of the last 30 years, the rise of the musical form variously called rap, hip hop, gangsta and here called rap.  

Rap bestowed new esteem upon impoverished urban teen.  As long as it remained the possession of impoverished teens, black and white, it did not change the esteem equation.  But sometime in the late 1980s, it crossed over into the mainstream, black and white.  Beastie Boys and Run-DMC were calculated to have cross over appeal, and the former’s Fight For Your Right entered the top ten in 1986.  In 1988, Public Enemy released It Takes A Nation and NWA released Straight Outta Compton. Gangsta rap was now headed for the suburbs. And once this diffusion of musical form had taken place, the position of the impoverished teen went from scorned loser to a creature of standing, status, and credibility.  So utterly did rap win the day that, with a brief but interesting interruption in the form of “alternative music,” the children of the suburbs now wanted very much to walk, talk and otherwise conduct themselves as if they came from very different socio-economic origins.

The rise of rap represented a massive transfer of esteem from the teens of the middle class suburb to those of the impoverished city. There was in short an abrupt and thoroughgoing reversing of the asymmetries. Those who once suffered esteem shortages now enjoyed whacking, great surpluses. Violent crime? To protest what exactly?  To exact a revenge?  To appropriate esteem?  Violent crime was now an antique of another age, the dangerous preoccupation of another generation, an activity that was now just odd.  I believe this is why violent crime began to drop in the early 1990s.  As the suburbs began to absorb rap, the esteem economy began to tip in a new direction.  Violent crime has become an increasingly pointless enterprise. 

References

Bourois, Philippe. 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York Cambridge University Press.

Levitt, Steven D. 2005. Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything. New York: William Morrow.

post script: sorry this is a little rushed. relatives for dinner!

I expect you remember the "Negroponte switch:" the wired shall become wireless (telephones) and the wireless shall become wired (TV). 

I have another: the things we own, we will rent, and things we rent, we will own. No, of course it isn’t as good.  But it’s moving day here at the McCracken-DeCesare and we have spend the last couple of days committing our earthly  possessions to cardboard bound by sticky tape which tape comes off the roll with a sound that resembles the torture of a raptor infant. Under the circumstances, it’s a wonder I can blog at all. I am quite certain the sky is going to darken at the next pull of the tape. 

Anyhow, when we subscribe to satellite radio and we allow this radio to supplant our standing collections of music, something interesting happens.  We have given up ownership for something closer to rental.  It is clear why we might be tempted by this shift.  Most of us have a new diversity of taste, in any one category there is often a lot of music that interests us, and the turn-over of this music is pretty rapid. 

Assuming the cost of survey and capture is for some of us prohibitive.  It’s just so much easier to let some else do it.  Yes, there is a trade off: rootedness (of the kind that comes from listening to "our favorites" many times over) vs. staying current (the demands of which now precludes even a little repetition, let alone a lot.)  Ownership is comforting but it is also expensive.

Or, put this another way.  Google has become a way of remembering and ordering the world.  It is a kind of intellectual prothesis or superstructure.  So might the rental model deliver this higher order value.  The DJ becomes our musical intelligence, now resident outside the head and our "CD collection." 

The move from ownership to rental is driven then by a simple motive: rental may be more expensive and less emotionally satisfying, but it is so much more efficient as a means of staying in touch with a dynamic culture.

But what about owning what we used to rent?  My case in point here is the sale of DVDs.  This is one of the great mysteries of contemporary culture.  Americans are buying DVDs by the millions, and by this time most of them know they are never going to watch these DVDs a second time.  But there it is: we are buying what the world makes it really easy to rent. 

It might be that we buy DVDs for the same reason we build "great rooms."  Both allow us to play out the fantasy that one day the family will all get together for a lovely evening of film watching.  Nah.  It is perhaps some measure of the extent to which movies matter to us, that we want to own a copy of some films even if we never expect to play them a second time.  In fact, does anyone watch everything in a boxed set?  Kubrick maybe.  But otherwise.  There is something about ownership here that we find deeply________.  Any and all suggestions gratefully received.  Me, I have to go back to boxing…and ducking. 

According to Reason Express, Wal-Mart is stepping up to the Target challenge.

As we have noted, this is, among other things, a contest between value, the thing that Wal-Mart now does well, and meaning, the thing it now does badly.  If I may quote a blog entry from December of 04.

Wal-Mart is good at price but bad at meaning. It can “pile em high and sell em cheap.” But in the process it reduces the brand to a commodity and the retail experience to a trudge through tedium. Placed in the Wal-Marts , brands created to deliver potent meanings, fashion, locality, individuality and lifestyle, are diminished or missing. Wal-Mart actually manages to wick away the very meanings that add value to the product and the life of the consumer. 

If there is a single indicator of the problem Wal-Mart has created for itself, consider the in-store experience.  They have managed to turn stores into warehouses and  shopping into that "lost in a big box" feeling we all love so well. 

Target is in its own way a value hound, but it also sees the point of adding meanings.  They source these meanings from better store presentation and packaging, and from the use of  design and designers.  Target stores and products are cultural located.  They are rich in meaning.  The store and the products do not have that dreadful big-box blankness.

To challenge Target successfully, the old dog is going to have to learn new tricks.  Reason has its doubts about their hopes of successs, as do I.   Wal-Mart is going to have undergo a cultural reformation to compete.  It will have to create a corporate culture that is capable both of X (the value game) and not-X (the meaning game).  The pursuit of meaning and value now spring from different mind sets.  They encourage different corporate cultures.  When brought together in a single company, they create some of the most powerful antagonisms a corporation can endure.

First step at Wal-Mart: copies of Virginia’s book for everyone!

Second step: hire Tom Guarriello. 

References

Anon.  2005.  Wal-Mart Targets Target.  Reason

Anon. 2005. Wal-Mart takes aim at Target. MSNBC.com treatment here

McCracken, Grant.  2004.  Brands and Wal-Mart: value vs. meaning.  This blog sits at… December 2.  here

Postrel, Virginia.  2003.  The Substance of Style.  New York: HarperCollins.

 

Many of the country’s stronger universities are actively discounting tuition. These rebates, which can be thousands of dollars, aren’t coming from endowments or government grants. The colleges are dipping into their own tuition revenue—essentially taking from students who pay full freight and giving to others. And it is the high achievers rather than the needy students who are getting a good chunk of money.  (Wall Street Journal yesterday)

Economic actors, even universities, are rational creatures. So why are they discounting the price of the “product.”  It can’t be to drum up more business. They’re oversubscribed as it is.  I think it’s to create more generous alums. Down the road, better students should enjoy more accomplished careers, earn bigger incomes, and give bigger gifts to alum mater. It’s a long term bet, but universities are well positioned for long term bets.

Would this be the time to think about quality control? There is no point bringing better students to campus, if we are going to inflict a substandard education on them. They will graduate unhappy. Or they will just leave and end up giving their alum dollars someplace else.

So it’s time to do something about those academic dead beats. You know the ones I mean. (If you don’t have them as colleagues, you had them as teachers.) Almost every department in almost every university has academics who just gave up years ago. Usually, they don’t teach very well. Usually, they hardly think at all. Now in mid-career, they appear to be struggling to qualify as late entrants in that rather large club identified by George Bernard Shaw. “Most people would rather die than think. Most do.”

Bad teachers have gone largely unchallenged for many reasons.  Clearly, tenure is one. But incompetents have been tolerated to some extent, I think, because it’s hard to figure the real cost of the damages they inflict.

We can change that. Let us figure out how much a bad teacher costs a university. This will give a Dean something she can use. She can sit Dr. Lunatic down and say, “Dr. Lunatic, we’ve run the numbers. And it is clear to us that you have cost this university a small fortune in alumi giving, and, clearly, its only going to get worse. If we add to this your salary costs, roughly $140,000 a year, you are one expensive son of a gun and a luxury we can no longer afford.”

Ah, the discipline of numbers. Let us find this figure and post it imaginatively above the heads of every incompetent. Let us fix it there, so that it shows when he or she is sitting at the Faculty Club, walking across campus, and pretending to look something up in the library. Call it a “price on their head.” Not what the bounty hunter can win, but what the institution will lose.

First, a “lifetime value” calculation: the student, who for modest discount “x” in tuition, brings in an additional “y” in alumni gifting each year multiplied by the number of years he/she survives after graduation, adjusted for the upturn and downturn of income over time.

Now, a “lifetime damage” calculation. Dr. Lunatic teaches the intro course twice a year. (His department is punishing him for being a lunatic.) That’s 1000 students a year. Let’s say 1% of these students were given a discount to attend. Now of these 10 students, one is so appalled by Dr. Lunatic that she leaves the university immediately. (This is only a tiny fraction of the larger class but the whole of her alum generosity must be charged against Dr. Lunatic’s account. If her life time value is, say, $40,000, Dr. Lunatic is on the hook for a nifty sum. If it happens that the student in question goes on to enjoy the career of a Carly Fiorina, well, Dr. Lunatic, you have my permission to shoot yourself. Multiply the (non-Fiorina) alumni cost and Dr. Lunatic’s “lifetime damage”  (on this score alone) is around $12,000,000. Talk about a price on your head.

Of the remaining nine students in the intro course, three will leave before graduation, the victim of all the Dr. Lunatics to whom they have been exposed. (Dr. Lunatic only gets partial credit here.) The remaining six students will split. Half of them will forgive the university their Dr. Lunatics and give as many alumni dollars as they would have given in any case. (Dr. Lunatic dodges a bullet thanks to undergraduate cluelessness. He is in short the beneficiary of the very cluelessness that it was his charge to dispel. Sometimes incompetence is it’s own reward and more.) The remaining three will give at smaller than expected funding levels, each more punishing than the last. Or something.

What does this add to Dr. Lunatic lifetime damage calculation? I haven’t clue. But someone out there must know how to run with these numbers within acceptable limits of approximation. I will happily give you the floor. Or, if you prefer to remain anonymous, I will post your wisdom and take your secret to my grave.

You can see what I’m hoping for here: a concrete number that clarifies the real costs of academic incompetence. As it is, university presidents, college deans, and department heads don’t have much leverage. Sure, it’s clear to everyone that Dr. Lunatic is a one-man wrecking machine in the classroom but until someone demonstrates the costs of this incompetence, it is hard to muster the administrative will to do anything about it. We need to shadow him on campus with that value that shows his real costs to the institution. Call this is a shame function. It makes us feel better but it doesn’t materially change the world and certainly not Dr. Lunatic.

But there is a larger opportunity for leverage. If we can get this number right, we can calculate not only the costs inflicted on alumni support created by Dr. Lunatic, but the amount that must be laid at the door of university administrators who refuse to move against him. Now we have a metric that can be used to assess performance in the high offices of the university. Dr. Lunatic has no shame. If he had, he would have restored himself to usefulness years ago. But Dean Robertson?  Actually, she has pretty active sense of pride. If we say she is costing us hundreds of thousands of alumni dollars by suffering Dr. Lunatic, there’s a pretty good chance she will do something about it. 

Yes, in my dreams.

References

 

Anonymous. 2005. Unlocking the Special Codes. Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2005, p. D7

Image above: Alma Mater on the campus of Columbia University.

Every other venture capitalist one encounters in Silicon Valley now seems eager to reinvent himself as an expert who can spot hot new consumer-driven Internet ventures. (Gary Rivlin. NYT)

Venture capitalists are good at many things, but, generally speaking, reading trends in consumer taste and preference is not one of them.

Sometimes they acknowledge this, as they did after the dot.com run up.

“Almost universally, venture firms said, ‘You know, we’re not comfortable working with consumer stuff, we’re really technology- and engineering-based firms, we made a mistake going into these businesses and we promise never to do it again,'” (Tod Francis, Shasta Ventures.)

Then they forget. According to the NYT’s story, David Sze of Greylock Ventures gets several calls a month from VCs who want to invent with him.

“They’ll say, ‘I’m a consumer guy, let’s invest together,'” Mr. Sze said. “But when I read their background, it turns out they’re telecomm guys. […] I think it’s great that the Internet consumer space is heating up again. But consumer is also quickly becoming a space where lots of venture capitalists are diving in without a clue.”

Now I am not going to do the usual arts & letters, social sciences, culture studies, & qualitative thing, and mock the VCs for their presumptions.

In point of fact, those who claim special training and sophistication in this area don’t have much to brag about. We don’t use numbers, so we have no sense of scale or interval. We black box much of our analysis so that the visitor must take our conclusions or leave them. We are much too cool to define our terms or to ask the terms be defined. There is a species of “identity scholarship” here that says you can’t ever admit to not having heard of a trend, a singer, a director. We are shameless about inventing proprietary language when perfectly good, and more distributed, terms exist. In sum, we are running mom and pop shops in a world that has higher standards and more powerful operations.

Too bad. The VC analytic traditions, the power and acuity of their thinking would make a contribution to the common goal: to track and anticipate a culture that now moves faster than the analysts who wish to understand it.

References

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Brands behaving badly: the naming and claiming game. This blog here

Rivlin, Gary. 2005. Venture Capital Rediscovers the Consumer Internet. New York Times. June 10, 2005.

Blog list changes:

I have added Denis Dutton to the bloglist. Dutton endeared himself to just about everyone a couple of years ago by hosting the “bad writing” contest which helped to publize (and one hopes, to shame) the rhetorical abuses being committed in the name of post modernism.

Pepys project

I will be doing a segment of the Open Source show on the WGBH show Open Source on how the internet can help us accomplish a more thorough documentation of the contemporary world. I have an interest on this topic as you will see on this blog one level up. More details on the WGBH show here

Last matters

Over the weekend, with the help of David Ely, I will be moving from Movable Type to TypePad. I am hoping this will be a seamless transition. Please forgive, if it is not. Thanks to Tom Guarriello for the suggestion.

David Walsh runs a nifty site called Economics Principals and it so happens that his present post is about Harvard’s President Summers (the subject of the penultimate post here). I recommend it.

Find his Summers column here

Here is a description of Mr. Walsh’s enterprise:

What is Economic Principals?

Economic Principals.com is an experiment in online economic journalism — a Web-based independent commentary on the production and distribution of economic ideas. It is not a blog. It is a shadow newspaper column.

What does EP cover?

EP reports on university economics, as it affects historical awareness, political debate and public policy. It seeks to put under-noticed economic journalism in touch with a wider audience. EP is not about the business cycle.

Who reads it?

Economists, journalists, managers, policy-makers, educators, lobbyists, investors, citizens — anyone interested in the connections between university economics and the rest of the world.

How many?

EP regularly reaches around 10,000 readers in 80 countries.

A follow-up to yesterday’s reflections:

It was once literally unthinkable, but we can now imagine a scenario that would cost Microsoft it’s “insurmountable” hold on the PC software market.

Yesterday, we noted the rise of Gmail and Mozilla. Today, someone very kindly sent me notice of a rumor that Google is on the verge of installing a calendar on line. Find the rumor on Slashdot here.

Add a database for contacts and tasks, and Outlook is expendable.

One might say, “well, no one’s going to duplicate the Office suite, so Microsoft is safe.” But, clearly, the competition doesn’t have to. All they need to do is to supply enough pieces in the suite to change the decision making process by which it is acquired. Once we have enough of the pieces, email, outlook, and browser, say, it’s going to feel like we are paying for things we already have. Now, Microsoft begins to look a little like the dreaded Corel that tested the very idea of bundling, to say nothing of our patience, with some of its offerings.

I wonder if Bill ever feels like Lieutenant General the marquis de Montcalm, the French military man who lost the Plains of Abraham because he believed his position insurmountable. Specially, he believed that no one would climb up a sheer cliff face, which is of course precisely what Major General James Wolfe and the boys did one autumnal evening.

“Hey, where did those guys come from.” Quebec City surrendered several days later.

In the 1990s, outside the dot.com revolution, the corporate world was focused on a Six Sigma concern for quality and cost. New training, systems, and cultures were installed. While a wild west was exploding in Silicon Valley, the rest of the corporate world was buttoning down. “To achieve Six Sigma quality, a process must produce no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities.” Now, that’s buttoning down.

That was then, this is now. BusinessWeek says that the corporate world is committing to something freer, franker, and more dynamic that Six Sigma. The focus is now on innovation. GE CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt is moving the corporate culture from deal making and cost cutting to new products and markets. He is insisting that each manager bring him three “imagination breakthrough” ideas each year. What a change! Now the GE must think less about defect and more about defection, how to escape perfect systems for the new. Will it work? Diane Brady says,

Immelt’s GE can be seen as a grand experiment…to determine whether bold innovation can thrive in a productivity-driven company.

For anthropological purposes, it is hard to overestimate the importance of this development. Traditionally, corporations have been the dragging anchors of a dynamic society. They slowed things down. No longer. If innovation is the new modus operandi of the corporate world, we have only begun to glimpse the dynamism of which we are capable. When the biggest, smartest, wealthiest actors in our midst commit to change, we will lift off and move away at speed.

Clearly, not everyone has signed on to this corporate revolution. I fell to thinking about Microsoft. Is Bill doing at Microsoft what Immelt is doing at GE or Lafley is doing at P&G? Chances look slim. We may recall that Bill almost missed the significance of the Internet, and he was obliged to call a press conference and declare that Microsoft would become internet-centric. And it looks as if the spam crisis is creating a terrible brand migration. Stay tuned for another recantation.

What happened here? Why did Microsoft think that spam was somebody else’s problem? It was only the Microsoft programs Outlook and Explorer that exposed the consumer to risk. As long as the alternative was migration to a new operating system (Apple), the transition cost was prohibitive. But the moment that Mozilla and Gmail emerged, surely it was time to snap out of it.

Of course, this spam came in sheep’s clothing. It appeared to be extra systemic, beyond the domain of things Microsoft was obliged to care about. It wasn’t “about” consumer needs like word processing or number crunching. No, it was exogamous, an industry problem, or the consumer’s problem. Merino wool, apparently. No one ever saw this as Microsoft’s problem .

It’s times like this that one thinks of Levitt’s “marketing imagination,” and his idea that the marketer’s job is to ask constantly “what business am I in.” From the Levittian point of view, spam was so intrusive, viruses so dangerous, and the two together so destructive of consumer value, that spam had to be Microsoft’s problem from the very beginning.

But forget the consumer. Spam was Microsoft’s problem from the simplest strategic point of view. Five years ago Microsoft’s installed advantage was overwhelming. All those people, all those corporations, committed by years of deep familiarity to a suite of software that was “good enough” in every category and exemplary in one or two. Talk about stickiness! Who was going to break this hold?

Spam. Spam turned out to be an “application killer.” How the world turns topsy turvy. I know the killer app that brought me to Microsoft. It was Flight Simulator. The idea of this software so impressed me I went out and spend $6,000 on a PC, thereby beginning a life long commitment to the Microsoft regime. I have a friend for whom the killer app was Excel. And once “lock in” had taken place, it was pretty clear that you could make Bill the richest man in the world just by showing up with a “good enough+exemplary” package. The installed base had its own formidable gravitational powers. Microsoft was its own planet.

And something snuck in. Plainly, it is too early to say that Microsoft lies in ruins. But just as clearly, one of the youngest, smartest, best staffed, corporations in the world has stumbled. And I think this tells us how tough dynamism is going to be to manage.

An innovative marketplace is always going to throw up “spams” of one kind or another, threats that come in sheep’s clothing, concealed from strategic scrutiny. We will exercise Levittian mobility and see the threat/opportunity they create for us. Or we will take refuge in a corporate culture that says, “not my problem, not my business.”

And this tells us that corporations when they create new dynamism through Immeltian innovation will have to respond to it with a new dynamism on the strategic side. Innovation will take Levitt’s imagination in the first instance (as cause) and the last (as effect). It will take new intellectual nimbleness to create and to survive.

References

Brady, Diane. 2005. The Immelt Revolution. BusinessWeek. March 28, 2005, pp. 64-73.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. My Gmail conversion. here

Thanks to Chris Anderson, we are getting a clearer view of the economics of a heterogeneous society. Chris has helped us understand ‘the long tail,” and I am devotedly grateful that he has referenced my work in his own.

The anthropologist wants to know why so many people are now prepared to produce culture on the far tail. These are the people who write novels and plays that will never find an agent or a mainstream publisher, who make indie films for which SxSW is the best venue to be hoped for, and who create theatre that is so far off Broadway it’s all about “Waiting for Guffman.”

At a certain point on the tail, producers are producing without expectation of a “livable wage.” Some of them, no doubt, have tournament dreams, that their work will be discovered and riches forthcoming. But many more soldier on without illusions, sustained by “day jobs,” the enthusiasm of equally obscure enthusiasts, and the intrinsic satisfactions of the craft. These are like journey men who spend middle age in double AA baseball, playing for the “love the game” and not much more.

In Plenitude, I have tried to account for some of the forces that produce these producers. One of these forces is the death of awe. We are not wowed. We come away from movies, theatre, Barnes and Noble and say, “I could do that.” And then some of us try. We are newly daring, presumptuous, assuming. Add to this, better educations, a constant, nearly intravenous, media exposure, and an ethic of individualism that still prizes creativity as the sine qua non of self hood. It’s perhaps inevitable that we should have novelists, film makers, poets, playwrights, essayists, journalists profoundly in excess of requirement.

And I guess this is where the economy kicks into action—not as a way to take the minor players’ products to market, but further up stream, as a way to help them make those products in the first place. These people need an infrastructure.

Pam, my wife, was telling me about friends of hers, the Martins*, who have for years struggled to make a living staging and producing their own plays. Recently, the Martins decided to rent their stage out to other aspiring actors and playwrights and, hey presto, they were suddenly in the money. It turns out there are many struggling playwrights, actors, and directors who need a place to prepare themselves for auditions. The Martins do not just supply a stage. When needed, they supply actors, directors or play doctors.

Now, I know this sounds like a Vanity Press operation. (In the case of book publishing, Vanity Presses see a book into print, but not into book stores.) But the Martins discovered they weren’t attracting “losers” in need of vanity support, but people with bags of talented. In fact, the people who came to the Martins’ stage to learn the craft, ended up, some of them, serving in the Martins’ own productions. It was as if the Martins had created a North Sea oil platform. Life that came for shelter eventually began to flourish.

And this is when a culture of plenitude begins to redouble its productivity. When even our second and third string produces stuff that’s up to standard, well, that’s interesting. But note the failure of gravity. When these players come up, they don’t owe anyone anything. They don’t need to trade anything away to get where they are going. Now we have talented, capable players on the margin who might as well be feral. This is when the culture of commotion gets a quite a lot more commotionful.

References

Anderson, Chris. 2005. The Tragically Neglected Economics of Abundance, March 6, 2005.