Information Technology and the Rise of the Power Law Economy

We show that the dramatically increasing share of income going to top earners is consistent with the rise of the power law economy and argue this may reflect networks and increased digitization. Specifically, tax data (1960-2008) show an increasing dispersion of incomes in the portion of the distribution drawn from a power law, as opposed to the long-established log-normal distribution. We present a simple model arguing that the increased role of power laws is consistent with the growth of information technology, because digitization and networks facilitate winner-take-most markets. We generate four testable hypotheses which are supported by the data. (1) Our model fits the data better than a purely lognormal distribution, (2) the increase in the vari-ance of the log-normal portion of the distribution has slowed, consistent with slowing skill-biased technical change, (3) more individuals now select into the power law economy, (4) skewness has increased within that economy

The Biopolitical Economy of Anti-Essentialism

If we are to understand the nature of the relationship between a culture and its economy it is necessary to trace out the logic that informs the apparently disparate currents that make up that culture and its economy. There are any number of loci by reference to which this relationship might be discerned, but none are so important or profound, or for that matter so telling, than our body. Following on from two previous articles this essay approaches the subject by way of Foucault’s understanding of the ‘biopolitical’.[1] Through the issues of sexuality and eugenics we see how the logic informing early modern liberal philosophy worked itself out, coming to its full realisation in what is today referred to as ‘anti-essentialism’. The rise of anti-essentialism is concomitant with, if not identical with, the rise of capitalism proper. Anti-essentialism, both as a cultural and economic phenomena, is necessary for the rise to global dominance of capitalism. Although anti-essentialism is often thought of in terms of postmodernism and performance theory something of its logic was understood in the early modern period. And it was so by way of opposition to the growing defence and acceptance of free-market economics, which acceptance went hand in glove with a free market in credit and debt, which is to say in the liberalisation of anti-usury laws

Property and the Construction of the Information Economy: A Neo-Polanyian Ontology

This chapter considers the changing roles and forms of information property within the political economy of informational capitalism. I begin with an overview of the principal methods used in law and in media and communications studies, respectively, to study information property, considering both what each disciplinary cluster traditionally has emphasized and newer, hybrid directions. Next, I develop a three-part framework for analyzing information property as a set of emergent institutional formations that both work to produce and are themselves produced by other evolving political-economic arrangements. The framework considers patterns of change in existing legal institutions for intellectual property, the ongoing dematerialization and datafication of both traditional and new inputs to economic production, and the emerging logics of economic organization within which information resources (and property rights) are mobilized. Finally, I consider the implications of that framing for two very different contemporary information property projects, one relating to data flows within platform-based business models and the other to information commons

Computational entrepreneurship: from economic complexities to interdisciplinary research

The development of technology is unbelievably rapid. From limited local networks to high speed Internet, from crude computing machines to powerful semi-conductors, the world had changed drastically compared to just a few decades ago. In the constantly renewing process of adapting to such an unnaturally high-entropy setting, innovations as well as entirely new concepts, were often born. In the business world, one such phenomenon was the creation of a new type of entrepreneurship. This paper proposes a new academic discipline of computational entrepreneurship, which centers on: (i) an exponentially growing (and less expensive) computing power, to the extent that almost everybody in a modern society can own and use that; (ii) omnipresent high-speed Internet connectivity, wired or wireless, representing our modern day’s economic connectomics; (iii) growing concern of exploiting “serendipity” for a strategic commercial advantage; and (iv) growing capabilities of lay people in performing calculations for their informed decisions in taking fast-moving entrepreneurial opportunities. Computational entrepreneurship has slowly become a new mode of operation for business ventures and will likely bring the academic discipline of entrepreneurship back to mainstream economics

The global cultural commons after Cancun: identity, diversity and citizenship

The cultural politics of global trade is a new and unexplored terrain because the public domain of culture has long been associated with national sovereignty. States everywhere have invested heavily in national identity. But in an age of globalization, culture and sovereignty have become more complex propositions, subject to global pressures and national constraints. This paper argues three main points. First, new information technologies increasingly destabilize traditional private sector models for disseminating culture. At the same time, international legal rules have become more restrictive with respect to investment and national treatment, two areas at the heart of cultural policy. Second, Doha has significant implications for the future of the cultural commons. Ongoing negotiations around TRIPS, TRIMS, GATS and dispute settlement will impose new restrictions on public authorities who wish to appropriate culture for a variety of public and private ends. Finally, there is a growing backlash against the WTO’s trade agenda for broadening and deepening disciplines in these areas. These issues have become highly politicized and fractious, and are bound to vex future rounds as the global south, led by Brazil, India and China flexes its diplomatic muscle

Movements, Moments, and the Eroding Antitrust Consensus

Timothy Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (Columbia Global Reports, 2018). $14.99. Timothy Wu’s book, The Curse of Bigness, offers a brief history on and critical perspective of antitrust law’s development over the last century, calling for a return to a Brandeisian approach to the law. In this review-essay, I use Wu’s text as a starting point to explore antitrust law’s current political moment. Tracing the dynamics at play in this debate and Wu’s role in it, I note areas underexplored in Wu’s text regarding the interplay of antitrust law with other forms of industrial regulation, highlighting in particular current difficulties in copyright law as one of the underlying tensions driving popular discontent with the major technology firms or “tech trusts.” I consider the continuing influence of Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox, now more than forty years old, and how the current reform movement might execute a shift as lasting and substantial as the one Bork spearheaded with his book

The Enigma of Digitized Property A Tribute to John Perry Barlow

Compressive Sensing has attracted a lot of attention over the last decade within the areas of applied mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering because of it suggesting that we can sample a signal under the limit that traditional sampling theory provides. By then using dierent recovery algorithms we are able to, theoretically, recover the complete original signal even though we have taken very few samples to begin with. It has been proven that these recovery algorithms work best on signals that are highly compressible, meaning that the signals can have a sparse representation where the majority of the signal elements are close to zero. In this thesis we implement some of these recovery algorithms and investigate how these perform practically on a real video signal consisting of 300 sequential image frames. The video signal will be under sampled, using compressive sensing, and then recovered using two types of strategies, - One where no time correlation between successive frames is assumed, using the classical greedy algorithm Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) and a more robust, modied OMP called Predictive Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (PrOMP). - One newly developed algorithm, Dynamic Iterative Pursuit (DIP), which assumes and utilizes time correlation between successive frames. We then performance evaluate and compare these two strategies using the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) as a metric. We also provide visual results. Based on investigation of the data in the video signal, using a simple model for the time correlation and transition probabilities between dierent signal coecients in time, the DIP algorithm showed good recovery performance. The main results showed that DIP performed better and better over time and outperformed the PrOMP up to a maximum of 6 dB gain at half of the original sampling rate but performed slightly below the PrOMP in a smaller part of the video sequence where the correlation in time between successive frames in the original video sequence suddenly became weaker.Compressive sensing har blivit mer och mer uppmarksammat under det senaste decenniet inom forskningsomraden sasom tillampad matematik, datavetenskap och elektroteknik. En stor anledning till detta ar att dess teori innebar att det blir mojligt att sampla en signal under gransen som traditionell samplingsteori innebar. Genom att sen anvanda olika aterskapningsalgoritmer ar det anda teoretiskt mojligt att aterskapa den ursprungliga signalen. Det har visats sig att dessaaterskapningsalgoritmer funkar bast pa signaler som ar mycket kompressiva, vilket innebar att dessa signaler kan representeras glest i nagon doman dar merparten av signalens koecienter ar nara 0 i varde. I denna uppsats implementeras vissa av dessaaterskapningsalgoritmer och vi undersoker sedan hur dessa presterar i praktiken pa en riktig videosignal bestaende av 300 sekventiella bilder. Videosignalen kommer att undersamplas med compressive sensing och sen aterskapas genom att anvanda 2 typer av strategier, - En dar ingen tidskorrelation mellan successiva bilder i videosignalen antas genom att anvanda klassiska algoritmer sasom Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) och en mer robust, modierad OMP : Predictive Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (PrOMP). - En nyligen utvecklad algoritm, Dynamic Iterative Pursuit (DIP), som antar och nyttjar en tidskorrelation mellan successiva bilder i videosignalen. Vi utvarderar och jamfor prestandan i dessa tva olika typer av strategier genom att anvanda Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) som jamforelseparameter. Vi ger ocksa visuella resultat fran videosekvensen. Baserat pa undersokning av data i videosignalen visade det sig, genom att anvanda enkla modeller, bade for tidskorrelationen och sannolikhetsfunktioner for vilka koecienter som ar aktiva vid varje tidpunkt, att DIP algoritmen visade battre prestanda an de tva andra tidsoberoende algoritmerna under visa tidsekvenser. Framforallt de sekvenser dar videosignalen inneholl starkare korrelation i tid. Som mest presterade DIP upp till 6 dB battre an OMP och PrOMP