Economics: The Next Book Revolution

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Do you like books? Then you might like this chart I found on Internet ( kedrosky.). It shows how the prices of books melted down over about 400 years. The sharp price drop was caused by technological progress of course. 

But the book price implosion also pushed technological progress, economic growth and the advance of our civilization. Cheaper books reduced the price of information considerably. Learning about everything got much easier and cheaper fostering progress in medicine, agriculture, ship building, business administration, finance etc. etc.

The book price implosion supported revolutions, because more people learned about it - and faster. The decline of the once monopolist Catholic church was made possible by much cheaper & available books because many people learned about the theses of Martin Luther and other reformers.

Today we are witnessing a similar development: The Internet reduces the cost of information swiftly - and makes it much faster. The price of information is imploding again. I suppose we are still in the low-left (south-west) corner of the image and we can expect that information gets much cheaper soon thanks to smart phones which give access to cloud computing, artificial intelligence & quantum computing.

Again learning about everything is getting much easier & cheaper fostering progress in sciences, finance, technology, business administration etc. etc. Radically cheap & fast information made it possible that we got vaccines against Covid-19 in less than a year - because the researchers could exchange their ideas easily and an immense amount of data pushed the research. 

The increasing and accelerating flow of information will help us to get answers to the rapidly developing mutations of the virus. It also will foster general education (especially in low income countries). Cheaper information also promotes economic growth because investing gets easier and the markets for goods & services - including restaurants, hotels, flights - are getting more transparent and efficient.