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Marx wanted something that most people, including me, don't want: a committee to make sure everyone gets what's best for them. Let's reject the Marxist ideal and instead consider the question of whether markets can be counted on to create middle classes as a matter of course.

The recent breakdowns of finance can be understood as the symptoms of a fallacious hope that information technology can make promises on its own, without people.

In the event that something a person says or does contributes even minutely to a database that allows, say, a machine language translation algorithm, or a market prediction algorithm, to perform a task, then a nanopayment, proportional both to the degree of contribution and the resultant value,…

Even the most successful players of the game are gradually undermining the core of their own wealth. Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be the customers. A market system can only be sustainable when the accounting is through enough to reflect where value comes from, whic…

If information age accounting were complete and honest, as much information as possible would be valued in economic terms. If, however, "raw" information, or information that hasn't yet been routed by those who run the most central computers, isn't valued, then a massive disenfranchisement will tak…