Smart people can be shockingly ignorant. I could not believe some of the arguments I ended up having as part of Pi's Crab working group. Not about Crabs, but about us. These were supposedly some of the best young minds in politics, economics, psychology, anthropology and biology, so you would think that they would have a basic grasp of our own history. And yet time and again they expressed the cynical -- I guess popular at the time -- idea that we are today no different from people 250 years ago.
We all work day to day for someone else -- the argument goes -- and yet struggle to break out, to do something clever, to find an angle, to have a hit. If we get our big break we can strike out on our own and people will work for us. Grad students are no different from Marx's Proletariat. We're all wage slaves trying to become the Man.
As I said: shockingly ignorant. This is wrong in so many ways but let's focus on one, the difference between primary and secondary value.
Suppose Charles Darwin came up with what is arguably the most important idea of all time -- the idea of evolution by natural selection -- today. As a 24th century citizen he would simply publish his idea. He'd have detractors, he'd have champions, but after the excitement died down he'd have confirmations, refs and cites. Auditors would validate his primacy and he'd start to get resources and requests for further work. His great idea would be paid back by the society that raised him and clothed him for 40 years -- with some hope and the opportunity, though no requirement, that he would continue to do great things.
That's what it means to "hit it big" today. If you have a world-changing idea we reward that success because of the value of the knowledge we all gain. We're interested in the primary value -- the idea itself.
But suppose Darwin had his great idea at the peak of Financial Age, say, 100 years before the Princeton Compact. What would happen then? The Darwin of 2009 could publish in scientific journals, but that would only earn him praise and citations. Except for rare philanthropic cash awards, praise from colleagues doesn't put food on the table, and citations are only meaningful if you run a science journal. Darwin would need to make money. A great idea -- even the greatest idea -- won't pay the bills unless it can be monetized. Setting aside the question of why a genius like Darwin should be expected to not only have a great idea but also be required to turn it into a business, how can the very idea of evolution itself possibly make a profit?
He could write a book, like he did in 1859, and sell it (at least for another couple of decades until books succumbed to the fate of all digital media). He'd appear on talkshows with Johnny Carson and Jon Stewart to advertise his books, and if he did well as a spokesman he might be invited to be a recurring guest on the Microsoft TV network. "Guest giving opinion" was a paying gig in those days. If he was lucky he might be able to capitalize on his notoriety by appearing on television commercials selling cigarettes. Or he could sell his iconic form and fight plumber Mario on a webgame. If things went really, really well, Darwin could create a TV series about evolution. Making money on that would require selling advertising -- convincing corporations that the people watching would like to hear about the products that they want to sell so they would pay to broadcast the program.
In every case the Darwin of the Financial Age would only have been able to make money -- and thus earn success from his invention -- by finding secondary ways to monetize the idea. The idea itself was worthless. It had no value. Let that sink in for a moment. The most important idea in the history of science had - no - value by itself.
Value, as measured by Financial Age standards, is very different from value as measured today. Monetization distorts incentives. A stupid idea that made money was valuable, while a brilliant idea that couldn't make money was worthless. It's astounding that humans ever made any forward progress at all stuck in a system like that.
Comments