Thoughts about Paul Krugman's remarks on the information economy
(Cross-posted from my comments at Paul Krugman's blog. These were approved, and you can read them, and perhaps see some followups .) Paul Krugman: What do I mean by the role of rents? Consider the changing identity of the most valuable company in America . For a long time, it was GM, then Exxon, then IBM. These were companies with huge visible production activities: GM had more than 400,000 employees, which was amazing when you consider that the overall national work force was much smaller than the one we have today, Exxon had oil refineries. IBM was an information technology company, but it still had many of the attributes of an old-style manufacturing giant, with many factories and a large, well-paid work force. But now it’s Apple, which has hardly any employees and does hardly any manufacturing. The company tries, through fairly desperate PR efforts, to claim that it is indirectly responsible for lots of US jobs, but never mind. The reality is that the company i...