From: Mikko Särelä (msarela@cc.hut.fi)
Date: Wed Apr 19 2006 - 14:39:42 MDT
On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, J. Andrew Rogers wrote:
> On Apr 19, 2006, at 10:22 AM, Richard Loosemore wrote:
> > If the bubble had not happened, people would still have flocked to use
> > and enjoy the stuff that the internet made available, would they not?
I was not only talking about people flocking and using and enjoying stuff
in the Internet. I was also talking about people being paid to learn
things like Java to do software engineering. In Finland at the bubble
time, people from all educations with practically no experience in
software engineering were pulled into companies to write code; to do other
stuff necessary for software engineering. People who in another kind of
world would never have learned to code one single line did because of the
bubble.
The result is that there's a lot more people with some skills making code
and most of those people are not experts and even particularly good. But
they have broken the barrier of transforming themselves into an
algorithmic world (say SL0.5). Because of this, we have an entire extra
generation of people who got to the paradigm when they were young.
Otherwise, it would have taken another 5-15 years and my generation would
have been mostly lost to the SL0.
The market did something that the public education systems could not
adequately do. It trained people to the new industry. That is an asset
that the investors have no way of getting return on, it's the people who
worked in the industries who got all that benefit. The financial markets
did probably the biggest education campaign out of their pockets that has
ever happened in the history of human civilization.
A good example of the same kind is from history of railroads. Britain was
practically the only country in the world that let people just build
railroads without government interference. They experienced great booms
and great busts. Still they created much denser railroad network in a lot
faster time than any other country in the world. Lots of over investment?
Yes. But market based overinvestment has the nice quality that it tends to
look under every rock for profit. And thus also lots of good things get
invested in - things that people would definitely have overlooked.
> diversity of stuff funded by it for both fun and profit generated a lot
> of rapid evolution. Sure, the Internet would have happened anyway, but
> it would have happened a hell of a lot slower.
Exactly.
--
Mikko Särelä http://thoughtsfromid.blogspot.com/
"Happiness is not a destination, but a way of travelling." Aristotle
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