The Value of the Time

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The shift economically from properties and goods to information is affecting things. The whole financial crisis sort of a prefigures this in some way, because financesa financial crisis, have been round for a long time. And so this leads us to the crypto example as an example of a relatively new technology here. So won want to so, so when i was at schoolpathe australia, colonists, pioni this stuff,. but we'd learned about a three sectoms of economy. O so that was what the economy was like. But it was still essentially to do with getting goods in our hands. Now the majority of an all, all the action is in information. That's

The idea of an “interest rate” might seem mundane and practical, in comparison to our usual topics around here, but there is a profound philosophical idea lurking in the background: if you lend me money now against the promise of me paying you back more in the future, I am relating the different values that a certain sum has to me at different moments in time. Traditionally, the interest rates set by the government have been a major tool for influencing the economy, but in recent decades they have increasingly fallen near zero. John Quiggin relates this change to the shift from manufacturing to an information economy, and we talk about what that means for the public interest in having information be reliable and widely available. And yes, there is a bit about crypto.

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John Quiggin received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of New England. He is currently a VC Senior Fellow in Economics at the University of Queensland. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Among his books are Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us and Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly.

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