New Economics
Instapundit notes that his wife's free giveaway of her book as a download hasn't hurt her book's used price on Amazon, and that further:
"People's willingness to make donations, sometimes sizable, in support of things they can get for free is something that has surprised me about blogging, and suggests that the portrayal of human behavior I got in Econ 101 was incomplete."
There is something very profound here, in the way that the internet has created products made out of nothing but bits and bytes, for which we pay in nothing but bits and bytes, and we take delivery in bits and bytes. Human economic activity is always the mixing of raw materials with human physical activity -- mining ore is obvious on one end of the scale, but singing an aria, reading a palm, recommending a stock, or signing an insurance agreement are perhaps less obvious on the other.
