The Articles - Microcosm
Large or small businesses? Command and control or a thousand million individual decisions? This is the heart of George Gilder's seminal 1988 Harvard Business Review article, "The Revitalization of Everything: The Law of the Microcosm".
Gilder, who authored Wealth and Poverty in 1981, focused of how enterprises start and grow in his 1984 book, The Spirit of Enterprise. This Harvard Business Review essay promoted Gilders technological tome, Microcosm.
Think history doesn't run in cycles? How about this excerpt from the article?
"Intel Chairman Gordon Moore denounced the venture capital financiers and the 'vulture capitalists' of Sand Hill Road, . ."
Remove Solyndra and we have a twenty-four year old discussion about Silicon Valley and Sematech:
"For Silicon Valley patriarch, the remedy was intervention by the U.S. government to reshape and subsidize their industry. Their ideas bore fruit in Sematech, a chip manufacturing research and development consortium to be funded half by industry and half by government."
At least the Sematech vision of industrial policy stayed afloat.
Gilder parallels chip technology breakthroughs with society as a whole, noting that lessons from the microchip can be applied to society: "The American strength derives not from the law of complexity but from the law of the microchip." Leave the chip, Gilder explained, and production cost increases, complexity increases, the world becomes muddy:
"In volume, anything on a chip is cheap. But as you move out of the microcosm, prices rise exponentially, A connection on a chip costs a few millionths of a cent, a wire on a printed circuit board is ten cents,. . ."
What does this mean for government and society? Decentralize. Command and control is useless in spite of government and big business's futile attempts to apply it effectively:
"Beyond a certain point comes the combinatorial explosion: large software programs tend to break down faster than they can be repaired. For communications, connections may multiply. But coordination and command impose impossible burdens on centralized systems."
More:
"Rather than pushing decisions up through the hierarchy, micro-electronics pulls them remorselessly down to the individual. That is the law of the microcosm. This is the secret of the new American challenge in the global economy."
I wonder what the cloud does to Gilder's theory? Nonetheless, The Law of the Microcosm is a great and important article read well worth your time. So here it is for you in tasty marked up PDF form.
Gilder, who authored Wealth and Poverty in 1981, focused of how enterprises start and grow in his 1984 book, The Spirit of Enterprise. This Harvard Business Review essay promoted Gilders technological tome, Microcosm.
Think history doesn't run in cycles? How about this excerpt from the article?
"Intel Chairman Gordon Moore denounced the venture capital financiers and the 'vulture capitalists' of Sand Hill Road, . ."
Remove Solyndra and we have a twenty-four year old discussion about Silicon Valley and Sematech:
"For Silicon Valley patriarch, the remedy was intervention by the U.S. government to reshape and subsidize their industry. Their ideas bore fruit in Sematech, a chip manufacturing research and development consortium to be funded half by industry and half by government."
At least the Sematech vision of industrial policy stayed afloat.
Gilder parallels chip technology breakthroughs with society as a whole, noting that lessons from the microchip can be applied to society: "The American strength derives not from the law of complexity but from the law of the microchip." Leave the chip, Gilder explained, and production cost increases, complexity increases, the world becomes muddy:
"In volume, anything on a chip is cheap. But as you move out of the microcosm, prices rise exponentially, A connection on a chip costs a few millionths of a cent, a wire on a printed circuit board is ten cents,. . ."
What does this mean for government and society? Decentralize. Command and control is useless in spite of government and big business's futile attempts to apply it effectively:
"Beyond a certain point comes the combinatorial explosion: large software programs tend to break down faster than they can be repaired. For communications, connections may multiply. But coordination and command impose impossible burdens on centralized systems."
More:
"Rather than pushing decisions up through the hierarchy, micro-electronics pulls them remorselessly down to the individual. That is the law of the microcosm. This is the secret of the new American challenge in the global economy."
I wonder what the cloud does to Gilder's theory? Nonetheless, The Law of the Microcosm is a great and important article read well worth your time. So here it is for you in tasty marked up PDF form.
Posted by Cultural Offering at 1/25/2012 10:24 PM 
Categories: The Articles, Business, Books, Government
Categories: The Articles, Business, Books, Government
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