Information Overload

We've arrived at the point in Econ 302 this semester where we're reading Paul David's "The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox" which means that I find myself again marveling at the prescience of this:

That's a pretty amazing thing to have written in 1989! (the paper was published in the May '90 American Economic Review, which has papers presented at the meeting in early January 1990).

For a nice (and un-gated) summary of David's argument, see this Tim Harford piece in Slate.