Prof. Bradford DeLong muses over the very long run at morning coffee

DeLong writes in his blog: "Productivity growth today is a hundred times the proportional rate it was back before 1650. That is perhaps the most astonishing thing about today's economy, when viewed in historical perspective."

RAEM

Readings: Getting started

Here are some papers that help to set the stage for Module I&I, WS 06-07:

Kelly, Kevin, 1997. New rules for the new economy. Wired 5.09

DeLong, Bradford J. and Fromkin, Michael A. 2000. Speculative microeconomics for tomorrow's economy. First Monday 5(2).

Müller, R.A.E. (2001): New economics for the New Economy? 75th European Seminar of the EAAE, February 14-16, 2001, Bonn.

Kurzweil, Ray: 2001. The law of accellerating returns.

RAEM

George Gilder: The Information Factories

George Gilder was a political writer who later turned his attention to information technology. At the time of the dot.com bubble his book "Telecosm" and his contributions in "Forbes ASAP" were widely read. After the dot.com bubble Gilder, like other dot.com gurus, were less visible on the the public stage. Now, in the wake of the Google-bubble, Gilder has returned with a useful and informative article in Wired 14.10.

In typical Gilder fashion, he mixes numbers that highlight the rapid advance of IT with strong one-liners:

"We are all petaphiles now"

"In the PC era. the winners were companies that dominated the microcosm of the silicon chip. The new age of petacomputing will be ruled by the masters of the remote data center - those who optimally manage processing power, electricity, bandwidth, storage, and location."

Googleplex, i.e. Google's data centers (about two dozen) comprise about 450,000 servers, 200 petabytes if hard disk storage, four petabytes of RAM, and Google responds to about 100,000,000 queries a day.

"... the cost-effectiveness of hard-drives grew 125 times faster than that of processors."
"By the byte, RAM is some 100 times more costly than disk storage."

"RAM can be accessed some 10,000 times faster than disks. So measured by access time, RAM is 100 times cheaper than disk storage."

"In every era, the winning companies are those that waste what is abundant ... in order to to save what is scarce."

"... the total of the energy consumed by major research engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts."

"... the purpose of whatever comes next --- will be to serve the ultimate, and still the only general-purpose, petascale computer: the human brain."

RAEM

PC World's tech forecasts

PC World has published a list of "exciting technology advances [that] will be here fairly soon". The 100 items are grouped into seven categories (PC World said there are eight):

1. Desktops and Laptops,
2. Storage,
3. Chips and Components,
4. Audio and Video,
5. The Net,
6. Cameras and Cell Phones, and
7. Fun Stuff.

I think such lists are really fun mostly in hindsight.

RAEM