PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLV: Information Goods & þe Measurement of Economic Growth, wiþ Special Guest John Quiggin

Key Insights:* Information really wants to be free—if it is not free, if it is “charged for” by advertising, or otherwise, you will get into a world of hurt.* In the information age the capitalist mode of production has become a fetter on economic development and human flourishing: Friedrich Engels was right.* We need free public-funded Mastodon < servers for everyone.* No! We don’t!* We need John back in the future, to talk about: (a) the euthanasia of the rentier, what is misnamed “secular stagnation” and the coming of a capital-slack economy.* BitCoin, meme stocks, and so forth are a reflection of this capital-slack economy.* We need John back in the future, to talk about how Elon Musk is a walking, talking, ranting, tweeting meme stock in human form.* We need multiple measures of economic activity: never draw strong conclusions from only one.* Xi Jinping’s plan to shut down social media and have more people building semiconductors to put inside missiles and killer robots does not appear, so far, a great success.* The ratio of Google’s user value to its real factor cost is on the order of 20-to-1.* Google’s huge market power and profit rate powers the greatest AI-innovation engine in teh world today.* Hexapodia!References:* Ralph Bakshi: Wizards…* Sean Carroll & John Quiggin: Interest Rates and the Information Economy…* Friedrich Engels: Socialism: Utopian & Scientific…* Google: Sankey Diagram for Google…* John Quiggin: Capitalism without capital doesn't work: The future of the information (non) economy…* John Quiggin: The Not‐So‐Strange Death of Multifactor Productivity Growth…* Chad Syverson: Challenges to Mismeasurement Explanations for the US Productivity Slowdown…* Wall Street Journal: GOOG | Alphabet Inc. Financial Statements…* Wikipedia: Mastodon…* Wikipedia: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn…+, of course:* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up> Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe