Contra NRx’s Techno Commericalism


[W]hile technology (a)decreases the cost of relationship acquisition, (b)decreases the cost of property registries, (c) decreases the cost of and often need for, escrow services (financial transaction costs), (d) reduces the need for regulation, (e) decreases the cost of geographic and temporal constraints, technology does NOT change the fundamental problem of cooperation: the incremental suppression of parasitism and the decidability of conflicts across different or competing regulations, norms, property allocations, and institutional processes. Technology reduces costs. Good law reduces costs. And that is the best that we can do. Everything else is achieved by trial and error. Because we cannot necessarily know what is good. We can only know with confidence that which is bad: parasitism.


Leave a Reply