{"id":603,"date":"2007-09-18T14:46:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-18T20:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=603"},"modified":"2007-09-18T14:46:00","modified_gmt":"2007-09-18T20:46:00","slug":"asymptoting-towards-zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/09\/asymptoting-towards-zero\/","title":{"rendered":"Asymptoting towards zero&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcaps\">N<\/span>early ten years ago <a style=\"font-weight: bold;\" href=\"http:\/\/people.ischool.berkeley.edu\/%7Ehal\/\" target=\"_blank\">Hal Varian<\/a> wrote a paper called <a style=\"font-style: italic;\" href=\"http:\/\/people.ischool.berkeley.edu\/%7Ehal\/Papers\/japan\/japan.html#SECTION00040000000000000000\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Markets for Information Goods<\/span><\/a>. It\u2019s none too elegantly expressed, but it has what you might call \u201cprofound\u201d implications: <span id=\"fullpost\"> <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I would like to coin a \u201cMalthus\u2019s law\u201d of information. Recall that <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Thomas_Malthus\" target=\"_blank\">Malthus<\/a> noted that number of stomaches grew geometrically but the amount of food grew linearly. Pool (1984)<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">*<\/span> noted that the supply of information (in virtually every medium) grows exponentionally whereas the amount that is consumed grows at best linearly. This is ultimately due to the fact that our mental powers and time available to process information is constrained. This has the uncomfortable consequence that the fraction of the information produced that is actually consumed is <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Asymptote\" target=\"_blank\">asymptoting<\/a> towards zero.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;\">*<\/span>Ithiel De Sola Pool, Hiroshi Inose, Nozomu Takasaki, Roger Hurwitz. <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Communications flows: a census in the United States and Japan.<\/span> Elsevier Science, New York, 1984.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly ten years ago Hal Varian wrote a paper called Markets for Information Goods. It\u2019s none too elegantly expressed, but it has what you might call \u201cprofound\u201d implications: I would like to coin a \u201cMalthus\u2019s law\u201d of information. Recall that Malthus noted that number of stomaches grew geometrically but the amount of food grew linearly. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[466],"class_list":["post-603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-public-info"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}