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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oblomov who wrote (28451)	2/5/2003 5:33:49 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Oblomov, I can't imagine the distribution would be normal. Human life is anything but a random process. It's not even a natural process [if we accept that the definition of natural is those things which are not human-related]. The gap between the median human's pay rate and the top 2% pay rate is widening. That's because the huge mass of humanity is more or less immovable, other than en masse in a relatively slow process. Outliers at the high income end aren't upwardly bound other than via attack by the mob and the value of what they can create for 6 billion people. If they can create $0.20 in value for everyone on earth, they are immediately a billionaire [since the cost of producing pixels is zero]. We should get used to billionaires as cyberspace expands to fill the human darkness. They will become very common [not that we'd bump into them on the street every day]. Because the wealthy and those wealthy through the cyberspace realm aren't paid in $ per hour, we are pretty much limited to measuring the mob of us who have normal experience of working at an hourly job, for an hourly rate. Which I suspect is over half those working for money instead of barter, love, piece work, other fixed price contracts or by compulsion. Where those non-time deals can be converted to an hourly rate, such as with piece work. It's easy to see how much people get an hour when they are piece work paid - I used to know exactly my hourly rate when paid for piece work and soon quit a job if the rate wasn't high enough. Re the non-normal distribution of talents, I think we are watching the evolution of humans right before our eyes. It's not a process measured in eons. It's a process measured in decades. The Flynn Effect is significant in itself. No longer are about 90% of people around the world living an agrarian life as they were in 1903. Now, 90% of people are in cities and towns. They are being stretched by the demands of cyberspace and globalisation. Plonk the power of Google onto cdma2000-powered cyberspacoids and the gap between 'haves' and 'havenots' is going to increase. Throw in genetic engineering and there'll be a new breed, literally. When It gets going, the difference between the cyberspacoid world and the rest will greater than between chimps and us. Maybe everyone will tag along. I doubt it. Evolution doesn't seem to work like that or chimps would look like us. Populations split up. The Bhutans, Amish, Luddites, Montanans, "No think - Just be", Eskimoes and other determinedly anti-futuristic people will remain in the old-style human world, perhaps accompanied by 80% of the population. The other 20% will to some extent or other stretch out into the new world. Maybe they'd be geographically separated by migration [already I have limited my house buying to areas with fast internet access]. But maybe they'd be intermingled in the same geographic area. Countries which ban genetic engineering and cyberspace are likely to remain zones of tourist interest like a zoo. The local 20th century people in them would put on tea parties to amuse the tourists. Mqurice