Hopes For a New Economy

Wired has a good piece out in their new issue that feeds my techno-utopian dreams and desires for radical social/political/economic change. The article, titled The New New Economy, argues that The Great Recession will shake up the economy enough to the point that the ease of communication brought about by the Internet will allow the economy to seriously re-engineer itself around small flexible businesses. The three articles branching off from the main one detail the need for the reinvention of the auto industry, the possibilities brought about by Google's automated auctions and mathematical modeling of economics and memes, and what they call the New Socialism as seen in online collaboration ranging from the direct open software projects to more indirect examples such as the tagging on Flickr or Delicious.

Now, I've seen a lot of idealistic ideas like this before, and I don't expect the economy to get rewritten in this mold in the next decade, but I do expect things to move a bit more in that direction. These ideas embody several of my hopes for the future of the economy and I hope to see more of this in the future. Now, if only we can get a good universal, easy-to-measure whuffie system in place...