Introduction to the New Edition
This book was first published in 1998, but it was researched and written in 1996 and 1997. Thus it’s a quarter of a century old. And everything about economics seems to have changed since then. The “digital revolution” had not yet spun out of control. We thought we could steer our way down the “information superhighway” and not collide head-on with QAnon. Or with a UPS truck packed to the roof with boxes of shoes ordered by our teenage daughter on Amazon. In the mid-1990s the Internet—often still quaintly called the “World Wide Web”—was regarded as a tool to be used to extend connections and expand communications. No one was paying much attention to the tangled weaving of the creepier types of arachnids. Nobody noticed Mark Zuckerberg (although, in fairness, he was only a disturbing child of twelve or thirteen at the time). Twenty-five years ago economics was thought of in terms of gathering physical resources to produce physical goods and services. That the signal economic activity of the twenty-first century would be gathering ethereal data to produce ephemeral crap came as a surprise. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only slightly more than a third of U.S. families had a home computer in 1997. And only 18 percent of those computers were connected to the Internet. The computers just sat there like bad, fat portable televisions that you couldn’t get television on. Email was novel enough to be a plot device in a hit 1998 rom-com. Today Meg Ryan would tell Tom Hanks to jam it up his spam blocker if her social media kept blurting, “You’ve got mail.” Google was barely even a novelty. You had to look things up in a . . . How to even explain a library? Let’s start by saying you couldn’t pull one out of your pocket unless you were wearing very big pants indeed. And it didn’t come with you, you went to it. Then you strolled, rather than scrolled, until you found the subject you were looking for. Just tapping on it wouldn’t work. In fact, if you tapped too hard it might fall on your head. A late-twentieth-century version of a Wikipedia entry could weigh as much as five pounds.
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