Create your own economy

What Hacker News says

1. chipsyJun 2010
   I think "mediocrity" is too negative. It demonizes the nature of the content, without reflecting on audience tastes. I read Tyler Cowen's "Create Your Own Economy" recently and it drove this message home: in a world where there is plentiful, immediate access to information, people want to graze and construct their own meanings and experiences from it - make it into building blocks.

   This demand is what is pushing us towards a vast accumulation of bite-sized delicacies - 2-minute video clips, 5-minute video games, <500 word blog posts, etc. A lot of classical inefficiencies are cleared out of the way by this - if it's all merit-driven, the work has to be as good as possible for as many people as possible - which means small budgets, a minimum of franchising and lock-in, a minimum of editorializing. It's gotta be tiny and focused, so that it can be reused. Sort of like Unix. There's plenty of room for quality, but it has to stand alone, be very accessible, and not get buried inside a sprawling monolithic work.

   This doesn't mean that the long form is dead, just that it's more likely to exist in the future as a patchwork composite of generics. That is our natural tendency; it facilitates language to do so.

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2. ChaitanyaSaiJul 2009
   Those interested in the concept of neurodiversity might want to check out Create Your Own Economy (http://www.amazon.com/Create-Your-Own-Economy-Prosperity/dp/...). The title is slightly misleading in that that book is more about the autism spectrum, neurodiversity, and a bit about how it might impact the way business are run and how they define their audience (I am guessing the last part will be of special interest to this community).
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3. sharpnJul 2009
   'Create Your Own Economy' by Tyler Cowen - a good read.
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4. TimSchumannSep 2018
   I have a personal anecdote about your statement here.

   I was at a launch event for 'Create Your Own Economy' in Washington DC. It was a small event, at least small enough I had a chance to talk with Mr. Cowen uninterrupted for five or ten minutes while I bought a copy of his book.

   Having read Satoshi's whitepaper a month or so prior, and being pretty excited about it, I attempted to describe the idea of a currency without a central authority to Mr. Cowen. I don't remember his exact words, but his basic sentiment was 'That's not possible, and even if it is, nobody would value it'.

   The conversation made enough of an impression on him he signed my book 'To Tim - To the Idea of Fantasy'.

   So I 100% agree, there's no way he would have funded Satoshi.

   https://imgur.com/a/fsSMiB1

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5. billswiftAug 2009
   Tyler Cowen's new book http://www.amazon.com/Create-Your-Own-Economy-Prosperity/dp/... is about managing information; he suggests looking at how autistics manage the mass of details they tend to collect for pointers at how neurotypicals can do better. The book's thesis is more complex than this, but I think he was a bit sloppy at developing it.

   EDIT: He also wrote a similar webbed article http://chronicle.com/article/Autism-as-Academic-Paradigm/470... This was discussed on HN some time ago; I was going to include a link to the discussion but the WebMynd search was taking way too long.

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6. christofdJul 2009
   Last: Create your own Economy, by Tyler Cowen

   Current: Real World Haskell

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