The Economics of the Economy, Is It a Good Idea?

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Aten: We're just finitead we that we can't know everything, even if we had access to it. I mean, when i was a kid, i read every book in the library spak,. But when that was done, ye, whence they went on to the suff you weren't interested. Aten: Some people are handling it better than others. It's goung av become more and more important to how the economy gets run. He says given that information can't be owned, but can be useful in the short run, who who owns control it? And is be did and am?

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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