A few thought on reading Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and Freeman Dyson’s The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet:

Is the internet a good vector for making information egalitarian, a tool for everyone? I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and say that it may not, in the event, be a great enemy of informational asymmetry.

The abstract of my musings runs along these lines. In the first place, the internet has so friggin’ much information, much of it opinion or heavily scrubbed and slanted data vetted by…no one. How is the poor schmo supposed to sort it all out unless he is one of the “experts”? Can one legitimately consider himself a maven just because he, too, has, er, Views? (Anyway, the whole point of being a professional authority is not just to know stuff, but to be able to figure out which stuff actually means something valuable. Yes? If you need an expert, then, who you gonna call?)

Secondly, there is this dynamic: Unions, schools, charities, democratic republics and their ilk may start out as popularizing agents that “level the playing field” (this is not to discuss natural disasters, extinctions, and other apocalyptic doings that plough the metaphorical field down to bedrock). But, within some period of time—humans being humans, life being self-organizing life, and pecking orders being what they are—institutional existence come to take on a new flavor, to become a quasi-living, hierarchical entity, replete with internal organs and immune and reproductive systems, and standing armies. (Institutional hierarchies are, of course, almost by definition feudal and strongly asymmetrical informationally.) More simply, regardless of the playing field and regardless of the game, an informational pecking order will, eventually, shake out.

…Given, to be sure, a robust, well-fed, and diverse economy. Like rubber carnival castles that need a constant supply of hot air to maintain their structures, complex hierarchical institutions require a lot of energy. But that is, maybe, a different (and tricky, and, these days, very scary) topic. Maybe a good one for Freakonmists?