1.2.4 Last not Least: The Internet and economics

Google delivers precise and accurate information 24 hours a day from every point of the planet. The internet is incredibly powerful at gathering, extracting and storing information.

However, that is not all. The internet is much more powerful in explaining and disentangling complicated issues than any book, which is always restricted to a certain amount of pages.

People are never aware of that, although it is crucial. People do not distinguish a lot from each other concerning their intellectual capacities, but they are a lot of different learning strategies and a method well suited for one person is not necessarily the best one for someone else.

The internet is the only media that can offer hundreds of different types of explanations of the same issue for a price in paradise nobody would even a get an apple from the tree of wisdom.

It is, therefore, astonishing that the economic corporation only publishes on paper. This is due to the fact, that publishing on the internet is not attractive. In general, there is little financial incentive, if any, and it does not help in an academic career. The problem is that if economists are not present on the internet, they will be irrelevant in the future.

A professor can write one irrelevant book after the other instead of creating one useful website and will never be destitute. There is no mechanism forcing him to do something useful. These are old problems described already by Adam Smith, as we are going to see later.

One possibility to introduce a mechanism of control comparable to those ruling in a market economy is to publish on the website of the faculty, the percentage of the graduates who found a job one year after graduation and how much they earn. If these data show big differences between different universities, then a reallocation of resources is useful and necessary.

If it is not possible to control a system through the mechanism that controls market economies, competition and a decentralized procession of information through prices, a good substitute that almost always works is transparency, and it can be easily obtained through the internet. We are going to discuss this topic several times throughout this manual.