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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27875 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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I don't think that your model breaks down when it comes to your Steam library. Your Steam library is as physical as a truckload of lumber. It exists on real physical machines that exist at specific places in the real world. If those machines stopped working, your Steam library would vanish. It is just that unlike a truckload of lumber, your Steam library is really easy to copy.

It exists on real physical machines that exist at specific places in the real world.

Add up the cost of all the raw materials present in those physical machines and you'll get something on the order of $10. All the additional value and wealth represented by those machines and the programs they contain comes from intangible things.

There is nothing new about that. Even in the Bronze Age, it was true that a house made of wood was a lot more valuable than a bunch of logs lying by the side of the road.

One actually new-ish factor is how easy it is to copy a digital product. I say new-ish because the printing press already made it cheap to copy books hundreds of years ago.

So part of the "intangible" value in the Steam library is that there is copyright law to stop people from copying the Steam library willy-nilly. But I would argue that in a sense, the copyright law is actually itself quite tangible because cops and their guns are very tangible.

There is nothing new about that. Even in the Bronze Age, it was true that a house made of wood was a lot more valuable than a bunch of logs lying by the side of the road.

The only thing that's new is the magnitude of the effect. Raw materials represent an ever dwindling fraction of the value of the good.

But I would argue that in a sense, the contract law is actually itself quite tangible because cops and their guns are very tangible.

Sure, but once you start counting the cops as tangible now you're agreeing with my point and negating the premise of the original argument I was responding to: people and the activities they engage in are far more important than natural resources to the wealth of a nation.

You know, it's kind of interesting that, as you suggest, much of the everyday economic value we talk about exists in forms that would be hard to explain to a time traveler from merely 50-60 years ago.

Well, you could just say to the time traveler, "You know, just like a book that is an interesting novel will usually sell for more money than a book where every page is just a random arrangement of ink shapes..."

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