nately, some of them are very difficult to answer, or just cant be answered. While the article doesnt solve any problems, it does raise awareness and creates some interesting connections with the present and the past. The overall question the author wishes to answer is "how can economists understand and explain the nature of societal change?"The information is explained mostly through a narrative history with a short quantitative analysis of the growth of the telegraph and the Internet. The numbers are interesting, but dont show how the economy has changed because of the growth of the Internet. Also absent is an explanation of "institutional" economics. Maybe its assumed that the reader already knows what institutional economics is, but I am unclear, and the rest of the article is developed around the idea that with the analysis of the internet, it lies outside "mainstream" economics and lies somewhere in "institutional" economics, but no explanation of "institutional."The problem and the weak part of the article is that he spends much of the time explaining the telegraph, how it came about, how it grew in use, how it changed the way people behaved, etc. While this information is pretty interesting, such an in depth history of it is unnecessary. He then compares this technology of the past with the technology of today, the Internet. He lobbies for a change, or at least renewed vigor for deciding if a "new economy" exists or not. One of the most important questions the author raises, well, rather hints at, is expressed through a quote of Paul Romer, a leading new growth theorist. Mr. Romer said:Once we admit that there is room for newness-that there are vastly more conceivable possibilities than realized outcomes-we must confront the fact that there is no special logic behind the world we inhabit, no particular justification for why things are the way they are. Any number of arbitrarily small perturbations along the way could have made t...
