Oligopoly
23rd March 2019
ZMan turns over a rock.
Way back at the dawn of the internet age, the people paid to promote the interests of the ruling elite came up with the phrase “new economy” to describe the rise of electronic commerce. The idea was that it was not just a different way of doing the same stuff, internet sites instead of catalogs, for example, but a new type of economics. The old idea of a business having a building, employees and profits, was being replaced by the virtual business that existed as idea on-line, without a defined physical presence.
This idea that we were about to step through the barrier between the world governed by classical economics into a new world controlled by new economics was very popular with the business press. Guys like James Glassman wrote books about stock valuations based on this new form of economics, where companies that had no assets and no profits, had stratospheric share prices. These predictions were hilariously wrong in the short term, but the whole new economy stuff has proven to be false in the long run too.