{"id":15163,"date":"2011-09-27T18:11:34","date_gmt":"2011-09-28T01:11:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/?p=15163"},"modified":"2011-09-27T18:14:39","modified_gmt":"2011-09-28T01:14:39","slug":"the-reason-for-boundless-optimism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/15163\/the-reason-for-boundless-optimism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reason for Boundless Optimism"},"content":{"rendered":"

This, from a wonderful op\/ed piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend entitled: From Phoenicia to Hayek to the ‘Cloud’<\/a> by Matt Ridley.<\/p>\n

The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace.\u00a0 Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all.\u00a0 It has been the source of human invention all along.\u00a0 Human technological advancement depends not on individual intelligence, but on collective idea sharing, and it has done so for tens of thousands of years…<\/p>\n

Knowledge is dispersed and shared. Friedrich Hayek was the first to point out, in his famous 1945 essay “The Uses of Knowledge in Society,” that central planning cannot work because it is trying to substitute an individual all-knowing intelligence for a distributed and fragmented system of localized but connected knowledge.<\/p>\n

So dispersed is knowledge, that, as Leonard Reed famously observed in his 1958 essay “I, Pencil,” nobody on the planet knows how to make a pencil. The knowledge is dispersed among many thousands of graphite miners, lumberjacks, assembly line workers, ferrule designers, salesmen and so on. This is true of everything that I use in my everyday life, from my laptop to my shirt to my city. Nobody knows how to make it or to run it. Only the cloud knows…<\/p>\n

…good ideas can spread through trade. New weapons, new foods, new crafts, new ornaments, new tools. Suddenly you are no longer relying on the inventiveness of your own tribe or the capacity of your own territory. You are drawing upon ideas that occurred to anybody anywhere anytime within your trading network….<\/p>\n

That is what trade does. It creates a collective innovating brain as big as the trade network itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So far this is already inspiring. We are advanced by the collective brain power of everyone we trade with… need there be any further discussion of free markets and open trade?\u00a0 Why, other than in pursuit of enslavement, would anyone suggest limiting the “collective innovating brain?”\u00a0 But there’s more; there’s reason for unbridled optimism.\u00a0 Not just a positive outlook, not just a subtle feeling that the world will Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The space was filled at the moment of the tipping point. It cannot be unfilled and replaced with a lack of knowing. It has happened. The future is very bright indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,212,29,379],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-15163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-enduring-interest","7":"category-flourishing","8":"category-group-therapy","9":"category-innovation","11":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1162,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/1162\/health-wealth-population-the-internet-and-more-wealth-these-folks-are-going-to-need-a-place-to-live\/","url_meta":{"origin":15163,"position":0},"title":"Health, wealth, population, the internet — and more wealth: These folks are going to need a place to live . . .","author":"Greg Swann","date":"March 17, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"During the boom, I wondered if the results we were seeing might have been fed by a reinterpretation of tax laws -- deductibility of leveraged interest, the owner-occupant capital gains exclusion, the IRS Section 1031 tax-deferred exchange, accelerated depreciation of real estate related chattel assets, etc. In other words, were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Investment"","block_context":{"text":"Investment","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/investment\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":17949,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/17949\/overnight-news-what-are-primarily-black-neighborhoods-and-how-do-they-overlap-with-redfins-redlining\/","url_meta":{"origin":15163,"position":1},"title":"Overnight News: What are \u201cprimarily black\u201d neighborhoods? And how do they overlap with Redfin\u2019s\u00a0redlining?","author":"Greg Swann","date":"March 9, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been meaning to mock Glenn Kelman and Redfin for its commissions hypocrisy, so forgive me my diversions: Redfin, a national real estate brokerage currently under investigation for undeniable anti-black disparate-impact redlining, is today making claims about primarily black and primarily white neighborhoods \u2013 the latter type being where you\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Group Therapy"","block_context":{"text":"Group Therapy","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/group-therapy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Ya think it's easy?","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/BHBNewTopImage-300x225.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":18115,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/18115\/overnight-news-humanity-at-the-crossroads-leave-people-alone-or-go-for-more-genocide\/","url_meta":{"origin":15163,"position":2},"title":"Overnight News: Humanity at the crossroads: Leave people alone or go for more genocide?","author":"Greg Swann","date":"May 6, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I will give you a very simple lens for understanding political issues: \u201cDoes what you want require the use of force?\u201d Are your neighbors your property, to be ordered around at your whim? No? Congratulations. You are now an anarchist. The Marxists have muddied up that word, so you can\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Group Therapy"","block_context":{"text":"Group Therapy","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/group-therapy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Ya think it's easy?","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/BHBNewTopImage-300x225.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4510,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/4510\/pressing-news-from-the-world-at-large-we-will-survive\/","url_meta":{"origin":15163,"position":3},"title":"Pressing news from the world at large: We will survive","author":"Greg Swann","date":"September 18, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"One:If we go back to 20 percent down payments, the market will be more stable. I'm sure that in a free market we would see 20 percent down payments. Barney Frank is the only person I can think of who still wants to lend with little or no money down.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Investment"","block_context":{"text":"Investment","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/investment\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":15672,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/15672\/debunking-artificial-intelligence-while-programming-your-computer-to-be-almost-as-smart-as-your-dog\/","url_meta":{"origin":15163,"position":4},"title":"Debunking Artificial Intelligence — while programming your computer to be almost as smart as your dog.","author":"Greg Swann","date":"February 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Everything you've been taught about Artificial Intelligence for your whole life is false. AI researchers are not frauds, I don't think, but they're exuberant when they talk to reporters, and the reporters are ignorant, thoughtless and brash. In real life, AI is Siri, which can reliably lead you to the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Flourishing"","block_context":{"text":"Flourishing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/flourishing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6841,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/6841\/thirty-three-touches-from-the-cloud-seriously-seeking-crm\/","url_meta":{"origin":15163,"position":5},"title":"Thirty-three touches from the cloud: Seriously seeking CRM","author":"Greg Swann","date":"February 7, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"We need a CRM solution, and it's making me crazy that we don't have one. We wrestled with REST for a couple of years, but we never got it cranking on all cylinders, and it lacks features I don't want to live without. Chris Johnson raves about Heap, but I'm\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Group Therapy"","block_context":{"text":"Group Therapy","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/group-therapy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15163"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15167,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15163\/revisions\/15167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}