I would agree with Brad De Long (cited in Arthur's post) with the one
reservation that the changes he's talking about have been already happening
for 30 years and, as James Galbraith argues in _Created Unequal_, they've
been driven not by the nature of the technology but by government policy.
Michael Tchong's vision, though, is anachronistic. If this was 1948 instead
of 1998 and he was talking about the TV instead of the PC, he'd be about
half right. The advertisers paid for the programming, but the audience
bought the sets.
Where Tchong's analogy breaks down is that TV and TV advertising rode in on
a wave of consumption growth that wasn't intrinsic to the technology. There
was tremendous pent-up demand in North America for consumer goods and
savings from the war, tremendous demand and little competition for U.S.
exports of capital goods (due to destruction of industrial plant and
equipment in Europe and Japan), and government policies aimed at
forestalling a return to depression. Attributing the post-war boom to TV
would be like attributing Marilyn Monroe's sex appeal to her brand of
mascara. Sure, it's done all the time in advertising, but does anybody
believe it?
Regards,
Tom Walker
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