THE ECONOMICS OF HORIZONTAL THINKING [ UPDATED]
Some time ago, I did a three-part series on cognition that dealt with vertical and horizontal thinking and their relationship to the generation of insight. I haven’t touched the subject much since then until today when I accidentally stumbled across a reference to the Nobel-prize winning economist Robert Lucas and his paper ” The Mechanics of Economic Development” ( not available online as far as I can determine -sorry. Here’s someone else applying his ideas).
Dr. Lucas argues that a high density of creative people, broadly defined as to include conceptualizers, executors and venture capital financiers, tend to form clusters with high productivity and knowledge spillovers. Ideas flow faster and translate into action and tangible goods or services more effciently as a result.
What is happening in the “cluster” ? You have networks facilitating horizontal thinking that would tend to become, in a probalistic sense, more productive as they grow more complex over time with the nodes forming ever more numerous links. Presumably, this process would be subject to the law of diminishing returns; human attention is finite. Concentration of talent in one location eventually will bid up its value elsewhere with smaller, competing, geographic clusters. Population density imposes a cost of living/lifestyle threshold that varies in terms of individual psychology. On the margins, some talent will always be deciding to leave as conditions change for the cluster.
The blogosphere is itself a ” virtual cluster” with blogs tending to form “ koinon” – a phenomena which often is obscured rather than revealed by blogrolls. Koinonia combined with the ubquitous use of search tools like Technorati , Google Blog Search and others would tend to distribute some of the benefits Lucas proposes, at least potentially when people begin trying harvest the blogosphere.
We’re just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do – and of understanding what we’re doing.
UPDATE:
Must be the day of the Dismal Science. Dr. Von is posting on the cutting edge today –
” Econophysics“:
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