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Comment by alanctgardner2 | Hacker News Reader

He has an interesting point, but he assumes the outrage by the high intensity users is proportional to the perceived value. In fact, they're just making news; they need to generate content, and this is something that requires no research, just a vitriolic rant. I suspect if we had a good way to measure 'willingness to pay', many of the loud complainers would suddenly end up in the 'low intensity' bucket. Less high intensity users means less network externalities, which comes back to my original point that the whole phenomenon is all smoke and no fire - lots of people complaining about the loss of a service that isn't terribly unique or widely used.

He does describe interesting models/theories, but I don't actually think they're relevant. It seems cheap and link-baity.

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> [...] he assumes the outrage by the high intensity users is proportional to the perceived value

Right, that's the point. This is a common style in economic blogs. They often follow the form: assuming some set of data, what are the economic implications?

> He does describe interesting models/theories, but I don't actually think they're relevant.

Right, they may or may not be relevant to this specific case (Reader), but I still found it interesting to learn about.

> It seems cheap and link-baity.

Hmmm, here we have a distinguished economist, who could no doubt live easily from his university job, instead spends time trying to bring scientific economic analysis to popular topics. Not sure how that is cheap and link-baity.

He does have a knack for catchy titles, though. If you aren't familiar with his blog style, "evil google" probably sounds bad (and emotionally charged), but I really doubt it was meant to be taken literally.

Hmmm, here we have a distinguished economist, who could no doubt live easily from his university job, instead spends time trying to bring scientific economic analysis to popular topics.

Meh... you could make a pretty compelling argument that economics isn't a science, and a pretty compelling argument that Krugman is a radical ideologue who is good at marketing himself. In any case, whether he's distinguished or not, whether or not he has a Nobel Prize, how else he could theoretically support himself, don't really enter into it... evaluating this piece of content (as well as any other) should be done on it's merits (or lack thereof).

It's kinda disappointing in this case, because that actually is a really interesting article from an economic perspective. But when he mixes it in with his psuedo-socialist, big government, leftist ideology, it immediately turns a lot of people off. I almost didn't click through just because it was Krugman. But he sucked me in with the catchy title. :-)

> his psuedo-socialist, big government, leftist ideology

What are you talking about? What part of the article made that impression on you and why?

That he has that ideology in the general sense is well known, so just the fact that it's Krugman automatically brings that into play. Per this particular article, the bit where he says:

So what’s the answer? As Avent says, historical examples with these characteristics — like urban transport networks — have been resolved through public provision. It seems hard at this point to envision search and related functions as public utilities, but that’s arguably where the logic will eventually lead us.

alludes to his ideology. But to be fair to Krugman, he is quoting somebody else, or referring to the works of others, for big chunks of this article, so I can't be too harsh on him.

> He does describe interesting models/theories, but I don't > actually think they're relevant.

I have to agree. Google is very efficient at profiting from casual users unwilling to pay, but clearly they just didn't exist.

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