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Friday, August 3, 2012

postheadericon How technology lowers transaction costs for everyone

more social revolutions in history have emerged whenever a technology is to reduce transaction costs for all

of our primate ancestors began to collectively come together to share hunting, child care and sentry duties, each of us has been subjected to a hidden tax, overwhelming. This tax is what economists call "transaction costs" and is the friction that occurs when two or more people planned to do something together.

Once upon a time the amount of time that our ancestors had ape check in on their "friends" to ensure that the tree was to "see predators" was not actually do a nap.

today are the hours spent in meetings, filling out forms, timing of our newspapers, issuing notes, reading notes, standing in queues, in order to agree on how repair resulting from misunderstanding, the application of this procedure, the implementation of audit, arguing on verification -. the endless litany of things that you do not do things, but it is important for you to get stuff done

You might wonder why bother? It's so boring grinding, half-half of Kafka and Solzhenitsyn. The short answer is that doing things together makes us super-human. Literally.

The things a person can not define what is "human." Things that transcend the boundaries of an individual - the construction of a skyscraper, to govern a nation, the installation of a telecommunications network, to write an operating system, are the field of super- human

more social revolutions in history have emerged whenever a technology is to reduce transaction costs. Technologies that make it cheaper to work together under the tax superhuman powers.

Language

(enabling explicit communication), writing (for record keeping), literacy (enabling remote communication and over time) and all the way to assembly lines, cryptography telegraph, telephone, (which reduces transaction costs by reducing the amount of energy you have to spend to keep attackers from their coordination efforts), computers, networks, mobile phones and au- beyond.

reduced transaction costs means that the powerful can do more. If you have a state or an organized criminal enterprise or to church with you at the top, means that you understand how to collect and distribute resources effectively to maintain its institutional stability.

When transaction costs down, developing a corporate surplus -. You can make your middle layer of management redundant, replaced by automated control systems, and another pocket or invest in more ambitious projects

The tendency of technology to increase the power of the heart is powerful stories like Orwell's 1984 - have a totalitarian state, add technology and you get hyper-totalitarian state, something that can to reach all corners of human existence, to meet each person each movement until the fleeting thoughts that are displayed on their faces.

However, the technology reduces transaction costs for

worldwide

not only well organized. The last 20 years has seen dramatic changes in the work of activists who once intended to spend most of their time addressing and stuffing envelopes (or distribution of pamphlets or the posting of notices), and use of a stolen time on the edges of what the posters, letters and leaflets to tell.

Some tasks (like stuffing envelopes) have completely disappeared, and institutional jobs - with all his fellow activists from more than one in-filling of the parties is so strange and unnecessary, inviting them to contribute to make the paper and set the type of your flyers. We speak today in a way that is automatic and effortless that sank into invisibility.

The same fate befell all but the most complex acts of race-planning, and many other industries complex than before. There is a decrease of the breakdown of the story, but it is the ultimate justification of their usefulness - which became a public service, so vital, invisible and boring that the forces behind our water taps and light switches

maintenance of computers and networks at low transaction costs. Becomes a tool, it is the fate of many other of our major institutions. Projects like Wikipedia that are much more automatic and less formal than their predecessors successors who are so automated that still feels like a thing at all. The project is still centralized automation that makes them so lightly established as Wikipedia -. Wikipedia skyscrapers, space programs Linux
Throughout human history, we were well organized, efficient institutions, powerful governments, military disciplined, efficient firms. We were very well organized,


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