In many ways, just as important as computation power is information. As a teenager I saved up for years from the earnings of my paper route to buy a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica for several thousand dollars, and that counted for thousands of dollars of GDP. By contrast, a teenager today with a smartphone has access to a vastly superior encyclopedia in Wikipedia—one that counts for nothing in economic activity because it’s free. While Wikipedia does not consistently display the same editorial quality as Encyclopedia Britannica, it has several striking advantages: comprehensiveness (the
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