Austrian Addiction

Jeff defends popularly undefendable cell phone usage. His article (well linked) shows the quantity of attention that has been devoted to bashing cell phone usage, despite its apparent amoral connotation. Jeff also points to efficient productive head way society has made thanks to cell phones.

I think these general misplaced hostilities toward technologies may have effects on the shape of institutions that operate within an economy, in that they are capable of limiting or inhibiting physical resources of being allocated so as to take advantage of relative economies of scale.

Jeff's cell-phone example runs parallel to academic scholarship's resistance to embrace more technical, and media dynamic formats of production.

The way we perceive and infer reliability and quality in economic research, has no direct relationship with the logistical productive potential in internet communication technology. But the successful usage of technology to produce in a competitive environemnt has influence on determining ideological dominance between schools of thought (see The Purpose of Austrian Addiction).

An individual is always situated amongst a dynamic network of institutional effects and influences. For example, more people wear sunglasses in Florida not because they are sensitive to the sun but rather because there is indeed more sun there. These relationships can influence his subjective preferences and the way he ranks his demands. Preferences represent themselves through action, market purchases, and the direction of physical resources.

These physical resources serve as objective costs to re-directing those same resources if consumer demands change. Such a consumer demand shock is abrupt and unexpected specifically when institions inhibit the responsiveness of marginal actors. Take for example older academics restraining themselves from producing academic material via the web or blog space. This decision may be representative of actual tastes and preferences or rent seeking motives, but their effects are the same either way. New entrants into academia see a higher cost to similar production technologies and it is a slower process of adoption.

There are unrealized alternate uses which are either never achieved, or performed less often, then they otherwise would have, had such influential preferences not been demonstrated.

It seems as though they fear guilt by association. If hesitants claim that most internet media (websites, blogs, group blogs, photo blogs, live journals, blog-rolling, RSS feeds, torrent, scanning, web cams, video-streaming, live video streaming, podcasts, e-zines, list serves, forums, chat rooms, group word processing, opinion editorials) are below academic standards, it implies to me that they wish to preserve their power and dominance over the reputational mechanism of publication.

The standards of inferred quality of economic analysis centered around mathematics may have resulted from a lack of computational ability in technology. Now that computers are easily accessable the material may seem to have a lower marginal value. But literary scholarship has a more roundabout production process. More simplistic relationships are easier to recognize in larger more homogeneous sets of information than random and constantly varying trends.

Perhaps online materials aren't the best existing examples of research but they are medium of communication with amazing potential for future applications.