We generalise the notion of a bubble beyond the financial domain, by showing how a single social mechanism, based on an information feedback-loop, explains both financial bubbles and other seemingly disparate social phenomena, such as the recognition of academic articles, website popularity, and the spread of rumours.
We discuss examples of phenomena explained by this bubble mechanism, as well as other phenomena that exhibit certain bubble characteristics, yet are not bubbles according to our model. Finally, we present mathematical mechanisms for two phenomena that conform with our model, and show by computer simulation how they exhibit bubble behaviour.

A close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital Volume I in 13 video lectures by David Harvey.

In case you haven't seen it, check out Elliott Gerson's op-ed in the Washington Post today, offering an unexpected measure of what has gone wrong with America's economic and social structure. Gerson is the American secretary of the Rhodes scholarship trust, and his data track follows... what Rhodes Scholars do with their lives once they come home from England. Precis: in the olden days, they wanted to be big shots, a la Bill Clinton. Politicians, professors, writers, people paid in part or full in currency other than plain cash. Now, they want to be rich. And Gerson has a theory about what that change shows.There is a reverse-backflip aspect to this shift that Gerson is certainly aware of but doesn't have the space to mention: Over the past 20 years or so, the selection process for Rhodes scholars has shifted to place less emphasis on Clinton-style BMOC traits and more on expressed or proven commitment to "service." So a group that starts out being more interested in social service ends up being more likely to go to Wall Street. Read and reflect.

I'm sure many of you have already seen this visualization of the "credit crisis" by Jonathan Jarvis. The 11-minute animation (embedded at the end of this post) is a part of Jarvis's master's thesis, which explores how to "use new media to make sense of an increasingly complex world."The visualization does a fantastic job at explaining the economic downturn in an accessible, informative way. The use of simple, iconic, visual representations to explain complex financial processes is a strategy that I think has a lot of promise, especially when it comes to expanding awareness and understanding of these processes to the general public. One of the great lessons of the economic downturn is the idea that global and national financial systems affect everyone. The financial crisis has taught us to question the "experts" who design and command our economy by underscoring the fact that we all have a stake in the management and operation of capital. That said, after watching, reading, and listening to analyses of the "financial crisis" for months now, I've noticed some troubling trends. Jarvis' animation offers an important contribution to popular understanding of our current economic situation, but like so many depictions of the crisis these days, it also has some problems. One that stands out to me most clearly occurs in in the seventh minute of the visualization, in a section illustrating "prime" and "subprime" mortgages:I'm fascinated with Jarvis' depiction of the sub-prime household, mostly because it lays bare the assumptions pretty much everyone is making, but rarely stating, about who these people really are. I don't want to overextend myself here, but my reading of this image is that that sub-prime family exhibits many of the characteristics that have been historically attributed in the popular imagination to poor, black households: irresponsible behavior (drinking, smoking), obesity, out-of-control fertility... Do what you will with the presence of a tattoo on the man and poofy hair on the woman (both missing in the depiction of the prime household), or the fact that this family doesn't even have a dog. The point is that the sub-prime household is depicted not simply as poor, but also as immoral. I think the racialization of the "immoral, sub-prime household" in this depiction and others deserves more discussion. The stench of immorality associated with the financial crisis has elicited a lot of rage over the past six-eight months. Most of this rage has been directed at "greedy" lenders and traders, but the undercurrent of contempt for "sub-prime" households cannot be ignored. What's missing for me in discussions of the economic crisis is a historical approach that takes into account changing constructions of race, poverty, family, and home ownership in the United States. I agree that it is vital for the general public to understand the workings of our financial system, but that understanding will be incomplete if it doesn't connect economic processes to the cultural and social forces that have shaped them. If anyone has encountered this kind of analysis in popular sources, I'd love to read them - links are welcome in the comments section.The Crisis of Credit Visualized, Part I:The Crisis of Credit Visualized, Part II:

When we read a novel, watch a play or a film, listen to a concerto, or read a historical narrative, we are not just attending to the moment but forming expectations about what will come next. Comparing our anticipation with the actual unfurling of the work or the sequence of arguments is part of the distinctive pleasure we take in such activities, and that pleasure keeps us returning for more. Such anticipatory or projective retrospection always involves speculation or guesswork, for every piece is unique. But being able to engage in such anticipation is an essential part of general intelligence, and developing that ability is one of the primary goals of teaching in the humanities.

This is a collection of papers on increasing returns, written between 1982 and 1992. Many of the articles are concerned with the dynamics of markets under increasing returns--in particular the role of positive feedbacks in locking in a single dominant product, technology or company.

The United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. If history is a guide, an Obama victory in November would lead to faster economic growth with less inequality, while a McCain victory would lead to slower economic growth with more inequality.

Under what conditions is decentralization of facilities rational for a client-centered system of service or administration, and when is great centralization more cost-effective?

An easy to use data access system was developed that meets UNSD’s vision of providing an integrated information resource with current, relevant and reliable statistics free of charge to the global community.

They were promoted as ways to spread risk, making investment safer. What they did instead was to spread confusion, luring investors into taking on more risk than they realized.

Information won't be free because its creation has costs. At the root, these costs derive from the fact that the production of information takes time and effort, and time and effort are scarce.

Venture Communism is a proposed investment model and mode of production that is designed to allow labour to capture the value it creates.

Traditional media argue their content has a certain intrinsic value, while Google says "prove it," he said. "That's often a difficult conversation."

The Semantic Web (and the web in general) is a co-ordination problem among a large number of publishers and consumers of information that do minimal communication with each other.

Our bet is that most of these companies will realize that they can become even more efficient if they rely upon a few, highly competitive and deeply technical infrastructure suppliers. Engineering for scale matters.

It would seem that the best business strategy for record companies at this point is to open the floodgates for online music retailing, which would almost certainly bring a burst of innovation in packaging and pricing.

The Media Tracker is a searchable, online database that allows anyone to learn who owns the broadcast, cable and newspaper outlets serving any community in the United States.

In Atlanta, focus group participants liked the low cost of living, an airport hub that allowed easy travel and what they perceived as a diverse and open culture.

The measurement and analysis of the role information plays in the economy and of the resources devoted to production, distribution, and consumption of information.

By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, Web 2.0 provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of free labor.

If the academic gift economy – where we offer each other intangibles and are tied to each other through vague debts of gratitude – were to be phased out entirely, the result would obviously be disastrous for the development of knowledge.

New York City and Wichita, KS, are among the many cities in the United States in which the state regularly spends more than one million dollars to incarcerate prisoners who live within a single census block.

Complete recordings of The Economics of Open Content Symposium held at MIT in January 2006.

Research interests are information technology and organizational behavior, social networks, and organizational theory.

Because America has mortgaged it's social and cultural capital for less durable, less valuable financial capital, it is less and less able to innovate in a world, where the economic is deeply enmeshed in the social, the cultural, and the creative.

Stories on graft just don't ring the clickthrough cash register. Neither do stories on politics in general. Or on wars or famines or other sorts of nasty business.

“The connection the most popular citizen journalists cultivate with their devotees is through an honest, uncensored, raw freedom of expression, and that can be quite uncomfortable territory for a traditional marketer.”

Consumer-created media takes a lot of time and energy — unless we develop economic models to meaningfully compensate the long tail, the ego payoff for most people won’t be enough to justify the effort.

Yahoo is considering launching a program to reward people who make Yahoo their primary search engine.

I need to learn how to read supply and demand curves.

Proposes several themes for the study of the blogosphere: economic influence, the convergence of sender/receiver roles, class and cultural representation, the constitution of digital identity and the limitations imposed by a digital divide.

Wouldn't it be economically more efficient for the advertiser to work directly with the program's producer to distribute television programming directly to the audience, using hyperdistribution?

Papers should address the issues involved in building sustainable models for openness in science, software and content. They can examine technical, sociological, economic/business and legal issues, and can be conceptual or practical in nature.

By focusing on major media, technology and communications issues and emphasizing local stories, HearUsNow.org will help explain increasingly complex issues and the connections between these issues, underscore what's at stake, and offer ways to make improv

Social and socially-situated intelligence; measures and characterisations of complexity; evolutionary processes; nature and application of context in cognitive and AI domains; social simulation; philosophy of science (particularly modelling); etc.

This paper looks at the Internet and the changing set of requirements for the Internet that are emerging as it becomes more commercial, more oriented towards the consumer, and used for a wider set of purposes.

The best network is the hardest one to make money running.

This paper presents a design principle that helps guide placement of functions among the modules of a distributed computer system.

Different stakeholders that are part of the Internet milieu have interests that may be adverse to each other, and these parties each vie to favor their particular interests.

This paper presents a framework for studying the economic architecture of the Internet industry.

From the March 1995 MIT Workshop on Internet Economics.

Models and frameworks for Internet technical, economic, and policy analysis are presented in this special issue on Internet Economics of the Journal of Electronic Publishing.

This is a set of Frequently Asked Questions (and answers) about the economic, institutional, and technological structure of the Internet circa 1995.

A product displays positive network effects when more usage of the product by any user increases the product's value for other users (and sometimes all users).

The network effect causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer dependent on the number of customers already owning that good or using that service.

In economics, a natural monopoly is a persistent situation where a single company is the only supplier of a particular kind of product or service due to the fundamental cost structure of the industry.

In economics, the main criteria by which one can distinguish between different market forms are: the number and size of producers and consumers in the market, the type of goods and services being traded, and the degree to which information can flow freely

Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is a central theory in economics with broad applications in game theory, engineering and the social sciences.

A social welfare function, in welfare economics, is a function which gives a measure of the material welfare of society, given a number of economic variables as inputs.

Welfare economics is a branch of economics that uses microeconomic techniques to simultaneously determine the allocational efficiency of a macroeconomy and the income distribution consequences associated with it.

Cross-fertilization of ideas between economics and computer science is yielding fresh insights that can help inform policy decisions.

This seminar will consider economic and business rationales for adoption of open source modes of production and dissemination and will consider how open source projects might be made sustainable.

In this research seminar, we will read and discuss recent papers exploring the many different areas in which network design and economics intersect.

Power in the Web 2.0 comes not from controlling the whole system, but in controlling the connections in a larger network of systems. It is the power of those who create not open systems, but semi-open systems, the power of API writers, network builders an

An information technology is also an attention technology, or in other words, a transfer of information is only completed when there is also a transfer of attention proceeding in the opposite direction.

It is becoming popular in our affluent society to rank income in attention above money income.

I want to help level the playing field and expose the free, open attention marketplace that is latent within the public Internet. I believe that people have the right to themselves and all of their associated data.

Collectively, the world's billions of poor people have immense entrepreneurial capabilities and buying power.

Dysfunctional business and political leaders cause the social, political and economic malaise afflicting America. It produces an MBA mindset that embraces the robber baron culture and Social Darwinism of market and Christian fundamentalism.

Once a leader in Internet innovation, the United States has fallen far behind Japan and other Asian states in deploying broadband and the latest mobile-phone technology. This lag will cost it dearly.

Attention is key to communication in any society...

I received this book as a gift, and found it unreadable...

In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel describes a new way of thinking called dynamism...

If you're at all interested in this book, ignore Hoan Chau's review...

Although this book was written in 1998, it is just as relevant if not more so today...

Economist Joseph A. Schumpeter's keen intellect makes some of today's scholarship sound like the spouting of ideology on talk shows...

Simple. Straightforward...

Problems: <br /> <br />1...

Given Castells' huge range of understanding and the sheer ambition of his work, it seems a bit unfair to really criticize this book...

The best book I have ever read concerning High Tech culture...

In the big picture of the Long Tail, there are so many items that even today's niche looks relatively popular.

For moving large digital video files, handling server-side post-processing of these files, web publishing with appropriate meta data and delivery methods, and enabling a marketplace with automatic trading and dynamic pricing.

These figures are representative of amounts that appear in record contracts daily. There's no need to skew the figures to make the scenario look bad, since real-life examples more than abound.

"Get the ownership system out of the way so that we can all add our voices to the choir, even if that means pasting our singing on top of the Mormon Tabernacle and sending the output to a friend?"

Value shifts from the transformation of bits rather than bits themselves, to services, to the selection of content, to the presence of other people, and to the assurance of authenticity - reliable information about sources of bits and their future flows.

Professor Bell posits that a system of fared use actually may offer freer access to expressive works. He argues that allowing copyright owners and consumers to freely contract under a fared use system may reveal a system more beneficial than one preempted

As search costs continue to fall, expect an increased focus on psychic costs. Simplicity, limited choice, and hiding the masses of data will all become more common. Even sophisticated consumers prefer limited choice when the transactions are tiny.