Thanks to the participatory nature of technology these days, its become fiendishly difficult to predict what's going to produce wealth[1].
It used to be easy, wealth was made by growing something and eating it or digging something up and banging it into a shape. It got a bit more subtle when people realized that dragging stuff places (where said stuff was likely eaten or banged into a shape) could create wealth too.
It got even harder when information became wealth. Mostly at first by letting people know the best places to drag stuff and the best shapes to bang stuff into.
Now we are at the place where the idea itself can attract wealth when it goes viral and millions of people suddenly contribute to it. Facebook, wikipedia, twitter etc. It might actually be a clue that these are hard to "monetize" yet are seismic forces in peoples' lives. Wealth and money might finally be starting to go their separate ways.
I think maybe the author might have a little bit of dig stuff up and bang it into a shape bias, but I understand how it might be difficult to spot the wealth creation potential in some of these "new fangled" ventures.
[1] Wealth in the "bettering all human kind" sense, not the "pile of government printed paper" sense.
Wealth and money have always gone in slightly different ways. Every positive externality is wealth by your definition, but I unless its internalized I don't get paid for it. (And negative externality are basically stealing or looting.)
To give less abstract examples: I don't get paid for being a good citizen, voting, reading the newspaper to be informed. And I do not pay for being angry, putting a lot of strange gases in the atmosphere with my care (yet), congesting the streets. Or putting systemic risk on the financial world.
There is something to be said for connecting externalities with incentives. Giving the right incentives makes people's choices more compatible with the outcomes.
It used to be easy, wealth was made by growing something and eating it or digging something up and banging it into a shape. It got a bit more subtle when people realized that dragging stuff places (where said stuff was likely eaten or banged into a shape) could create wealth too.
It got even harder when information became wealth. Mostly at first by letting people know the best places to drag stuff and the best shapes to bang stuff into.
Now we are at the place where the idea itself can attract wealth when it goes viral and millions of people suddenly contribute to it. Facebook, wikipedia, twitter etc. It might actually be a clue that these are hard to "monetize" yet are seismic forces in peoples' lives. Wealth and money might finally be starting to go their separate ways.
I think maybe the author might have a little bit of dig stuff up and bang it into a shape bias, but I understand how it might be difficult to spot the wealth creation potential in some of these "new fangled" ventures.
[1] Wealth in the "bettering all human kind" sense, not the "pile of government printed paper" sense.