03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
The Market is Not Darwinian
What is a market? And what does it have to do with the Internet? The fashion right now, one I follow, is to think of the Internet as a living environment, a place for societies, communities, and institutions to grow--rather than as something constructed, a superhighway, for example. That leads to appropriate metaphors, looking at the Net as something to be cultivated and nurtured rather than built or engineered. (Only its rules need to be designed so that it can grow in good health.) The stru...The marketplace is not survival of the fittest, where an invisible hand allows for the emergence of the best strategies, but an artificial system where strategies, good or bad, are perpetually nurtured.