From: Chris Hibbert (hibbert@mydruthers.com)
Date: Sun Dec 16 2001 - 12:08:36 MST
Non-member submission from [Chris Hibbert <hibbert@mydruthers.com>]
On whether the rich get richer when new technologies become available:
I'd like to underscore Mike Lorrey's point. Nearly all technologies
trickle down eventually, and as the pace of change has gotten faster, it
has seemed to me that the trickle down has happened faster as well.
One of the points that Julian Simon constantly emphasized was that his
intellectual opponents constantly stressed how far the poor were behind
the rich in various measurements of access to wealth. (longevity,
access to health care, susceptibility to various diseases, for example)
If you instead focus on the changing statistics over time, what you'll
see in nearly any time series is how much the poor are catching up. The
same is true over time in access to technology.
If someone doesn't lead, and make use of the technology when it's
expensive, the industry won't develop better mechanisms, and better ways
of making it accessible, and it'll never get cheap enough to be
pervasively accessible. This is consistent across all technologies.
Chris
--
Chris Hibbert
Currently reading: Joan Slonczewski "Brain Plague",
Julian Simon "The Ultimate Resource II"
http://discuss.foresight.org/~hibbert
chris@pancrit.org
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