Its not the end of economics as we know it…but

I am in the middle of reading Yochai Benkler’s book   The Wealth of Networks.

Tons of useful stuff, however, this I found to be interesting, in trying to get companies/ organisations to understand and therefore rethink how they do what they do, going forward.

We need not declare the end of economics as we know it. We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production. That is, behaviours and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere their own patterns. what has changed is that now these patterns of behaviour have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship amd mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and organising productive behaviour at the very core of the information economy.

and it is this increasing role a a modality of information production that ripples through the rest of the book. It is the feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than market and proprietary relations ? through cooperative peer production and coordinate individual action ? that creates the opportunities for greater autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and perhaps a more equitable global coommunity

Via   Boing boing And  Smartmobs

And Lawrence Lessig, someone who I admire, urges us who are interested in this topic to read the book

Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks, is out. This is – by far – the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this. The book has a wiki; it can be downloaded as a pdf for free under a Creative Commons license ; or it can be bought at places like Amazon.

Read it. Understand it. You are not serious about these issues – on either side of these debates – unless you have read this book.

I would tend to agree.

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