Karl Smith playfully suggests that it is ironic that Steve Jobs has so many fans among Austrian economists: Apple was principally the complete opposite of the decentralized local-knowledge driven catallaxy that Austrian’s trumpet. It was a highly centralized, tightly controlled integrated company that managed every step of the process from design to retailing. …Apple seemed [...]
Tags: Alchian, Apple, central planning, Coase, Hayek, Jobs, Smith, The Meaning of Competition, The Nature of the Firm, The Use of Knowledge in Society, Uncertainty Evolution and Economic Theory
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I had lunch with my colleague Stewart Dompe today and we discussed this question. Here are some hypotheses. There used to be many attempts at world domination, up through Hitler, but attempting world domination is a high-risk endeavor, and modern life is so cushy that fewer people think it is worth the risk. Variant: modern [...]
Tags: Alexander, eggplant, Hitler, Jobs, Napoleon, world domination
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The very clever Josh Knox points me to Steve Jobs’s open letter about Flash. Following up on my last post on double marginalization, he wonders if Apple’s distaste for Flash can be explained in those terms. Josh is absolutely correct. The money sentence in Jobs’s letter is this: Though the operating system for the iPhone, [...]
Tags: Adobe, Apple, double marginalization, economics, Flash, Jobs, Knox, open standards
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