Lecture on the Information Network Economy at Berkeley

FYI, On Wednesday, March 11, I will give 2 lectures at Berkeley on the Information Network Economy, one in the Communications School, the second in International House.

UC Berkeley Information School Distinguished Lecture
“Lessons from a Road Warrior”
Time: 4:00pm, Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Location: 202 South Hall, UC Berkeley

Speech Topic: “Lessons from a Road Warrior”
Time: 7:30 pm, March 11, 2009
Location: Home Room, International House at UC Berkeley

Information networks ar the subject of much of my recent book, Lessons from a Road Warrior. Both Hayek and Schumpeter wrote about market economies as information networks which use symbols (prices) to convey the information, and only the information, that each of us needs to make the important decisions in our economic lives. To Schumpeter, this was a market economy solves its most difficult problem–the division of knowledge.

But the information networks we call markets, like all other networks, fail from time to time, in the same way the electricity grid that supplies your house with power fails from time to time. Recent advances in network theory suggest that network failures, while not predictable, display properties which are determined by network architecture–how many people are connected to how many other people with how many redundancies.

We are living through a massive network failure now that we call the credit crunch. As I have written over the past year, I believe that our policy architecture has made the problem worse but that this blackout, like all the others we have known in history will also end. These lectures, like the book, attempt to use network theory and ideas from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to understand the current global economic collapse and how to avoid–or at least mitigate–the next one.

JR