THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

strangers could hardly be expected to share in so scarce a resource.
[...] In the industrial era, poverty was explained and justified by
shortages of things: there just weren't enough minerals, food, fiber
and manufactures to go around.
'... Theoretically at least, compared to things as resource,
information- as-resource should encourage:
The spreading of benefits rather than the concentration of wealth
(information can be more readily shared than petroleum, gold or
even water)
The maximisation of choice rather than the suppression of diversity
(the informed are harder to regiment than the uninformed).'
The negative forces
Paradoxically, the dynamics of information economics could also
create an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of a
very few Information Age billionaires; business barons who bear
scant resemblance to those who created wealth during the Industrial
Age. Some people foresee the spread of a 'Winner-Takes-All'
economic environment.81 The trend towards increasingly exorbitant
compensation for the very few at the top has been notorious. It
started with movie stars, entertainment and sports heroes, and
spread over the past decade to high-performance CEOs, traders,
lawyers and doctors. Is this just a strange shift in societal values, or is
this also a consequence of deep-seated forces in the information
economy?
The 'network economist' Brian Arthur claims that positive marginal
rates of return can propel some corporations into an almost
impregnable monopoly. For instance, once a particular software
moves towards becoming an industry standard, it will tend