HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029356.jpg

WY FAAWY BALSA UEL W442 2 we Se LSS PEE ES Ie EE Ey economy of near zero marginal cost and the prospect of nearly free goods and services. This catch-22 is the inherent contradiction that underlies capitalist theory and practice. Eighty years after Lange and Keynes made their observations, con- temporary economists are once again peering into the contradictory work- ings of the capitalist system, unsure of Lawrence Summers, U.S. secretary of the treasury during President Bill Clinton’s administration and former president of Harvard University, and J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of Cal- ifornia, Berkeley, revisited the capitalist dilemma ina joint paper delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s symposium, “Economic Pol- icy for the Information Economy,” in August 2001. This time, there was much more at stake as the new information technologies and the incipient Internet communication revolution were threatening to take the capitalist system to a near zero marginal cost reality in the coming decades. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029356