This quarter in the MCDM at the University of Washington (my final quarter, w00t!), I am taking a course entitled “Economics of Digital Communication”. During introductions in the class I rightly indicated that I am only in the class because it is one of the two being offered this quarter that I had not yet taken. I don’t know anything about economics, and I am not certain it’s a field that is of any interest to me. However, after one night of class and doing some reading for my other course, also related to economics, I am beginning to feel much more interest. I am realizing that economics is actually a realm expressly critical to everything we do, because there is a dollar sign attached to everything in the universe, or so it seems.
This isn’t at all to say I know absolutely nothing about technology and business, if not specifically economics. I know plenty about innovation, incumbents, disruptors, and so forth. But, now I need to learn about the Information Economy. And, gladly, our instructor has been going over the basics of economics already, so I feel I won’t be utterly lost in this course.
So, my key goals for this quarter are to learn the following:
- How does supply and demand apply to information?
- How do you place a dollar sign on something that is not a scarce resource?
- How on Earth, other than supplying knowledge to enact change, do you develop an Information Economy in places still fixated on scarcity, like the developing world? I mean, isn’t a cell-phone or OLPC (“One Laptop Per Child“) pointless if you’ve got nothing to eat?
Kathy Gill, a brilliant woman who I’ve had the pleasure of taking a course from before, is our instructor. I think I will learn a lot because my indifference to the subject of economics will probably mean I’ve got a massive untouched portion of my brain to awaken to these pretty new ideas (to me, that is). I look forward to it!
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Tags: economics, kathy gill, MCDM, net economics