How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left versus Right Debates Irrelevant

Oy. Just reverse what this article says. Traditional economics (on the left esp) was HIGHLY concerned with network effects - railway and electric power monopolies etc, and eventually closely controlled them. But we aren't as smart as our great-grandfathers, so we've let public utilities (such as Facebook) and network-effect and lock-in monopolies (too many to name) run absolute riot.

It's an old term, "Railway network," and it means what it says. The Sherman Antitrust Act was used, for example, in 1904 to dissolve the Northern Securities Company (a railroad holding company). They knew well how pernicious network effects could be, from experience. We're just catching up.

This sounds like more Keynesian style delusion to justify the elitism of central economic planners. For instance the comment about economists 'realising' that individuals are not perfectly rational and markets are not perfectly efficient is a classic Keynesian misunderstanding of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which says that markets approach efficiency, and the individuals that shape markets approach rationality, over time. The theory is a logical extrapolation of the effect of evolutionary processes on market behavior.

I would like to see agent-based models of protective tariffs.

Free Trade has been US policy post WWII. But the US had its best growth rates in the 1800s and early 1900s with high protective tariffs.

Lets see what agent-based models predict.

This sort of reminds me of some essays from LvMi so it's weird how conclusions can vary with similar assumptions about the economy. But it's still an interesting read.