Tag: economics

Product Space

The idea of the Product Space can be conceptualized in the following manner: consider a product to be a tree, and the collection of all products to be a forest. A country consists of a set of firms—in this analogy, monkeys—which exploit products, or here, live in the trees. For the monkeys, the process of growth means moving from a poorer part of the forest, where the trees bear little fruit, to a better part of the forest. To do this, the monkeys must jump distances; that is, redeploy (physical, human, and institutional) capital to make new products. Traditional economic theory disregards the structure of the forest, assuming that there is always a tree within reach. However, if the forest is not homogeneous, there will be areas of dense tree growth in which the monkeys must exert little effort to reach new trees, and sparse regions in which jumping to a new tree is very difficult. In fact, if some areas are very deserted, monkeys may be unable to move through the forest at all. Therefore, the structure of the forest and a monkey’s location within it dictates the monkey’s capacity for growth; in terms of economy, the topology of this “product space” impacts a country’s ability to begin producing new goods.

Buffalo

The truth is, the federal government has already spent vast sums of taxpayer money over the past 50 years to revitalize Buffalo, only to watch the city continue to decay. Future federal spending that tries to revive the city will likely prove equally futile. The federal government should instead pursue policies that help Buffalo’s citizens, not the city as a geographical place. The best scenario would be for Buffalo to become a much smaller but more vibrant community—shrinking to greatness, in effect.

Buffalo had past glory? why wasting money to ‘revitalize’ a place as opposed to helping people directly is a failed cause. I concluded after my visit that it is a basket case and best dismantled.

Is Zipcar revolutionary?

The founder of zipcar on how mesh networking leads to radically transparent transportation economics, which is what makes people turn on a dime. We need this now.

If we’re going to spend out oodles of money for wireless infrastructure for our transportation systems for congestion pricing and for road pricing, we should be making those open networks using open standards, i.e., things that consumers and businesspeople have devices that hook up to. We’d actually do an open source communications platform. And we can transform this required investment in transportation wireless infrastructure into something that’s an economic development boon and that makes information ubiquitous and very, very low cost, while we’re making CO2 — the old economy — high cost.