Baumol at SPU and on NewMusicBox

I’ve been working on this line of research for over a year, and the first publications are out today. Above, we’ve got video of the talk I gave at Seattle Pacific University last month for their Futures of Music Series, hosted by Brian Chin. And today NewMusicBox has published my first written account of this …

More on Art and Money

really good critique from Dennis Loo Based on some good feedback, I’d like to revise and extend my previous bit of ontology. First, and most importantly, I need to walk back some of the universal claims. Dennis Loo (who was my RA at summer camp in 1997), made a very good point on Facebook. I …

Art is really a lot like money

I don’t know if I find this idea convincing. I certainly find it attractive. If you know of someone who’s tried to argue this way before, or if you have holes to poke in the idea, please have at it. Art Is Like Money Art is an awful lot like money, but fundamentally incommensurate with …

Amanda Palmer paying with love

Late Update: Amanda Palmer is now paying all her musicians. Good for her. I’m very glad she’s doing it, but I also think the level of outrage was way out of proportion with the situation. The controversy over this has basically been dealt with. The Kickstarter million is in fact gone, the amount needed to …

Social Capital and Regular Capital

So….. Facebook’s stock is dropping a bit. Ignoring the major explanations: a bank that didn’t underprice the stock to take piles of money off of a tech company, a big honking tech bubble, etc., there’s something else going on. We all have this basic feeling that Facebook is actually hugely important and hugely valuable. We …

Connection Wealth for Artists

So, social connection and money both solve similar coordination problems. And for a couple centuries doing economics meant you could basically ignore the social connection category of wealth, because it was a pain in the ass to analyze and it wasn’t that powerful, really. But now there are a ton more social connections and those …

Money and the Internet

I’ve written before about how things that used to involve money and companies, and therefore appear in “the economy”, no loger have to do so, thanks to the internet. If I needed a place to crash in a strange city, I used to have to pay a hotel. Now I can use all these lovely …