[extropy-chat] Slashdot draft: Prediction markets and spacedevelopment

[Technotranscendence]

On Monday, June 13, 2005 6:46 PM Mike Lorrey mlorrey at yahoo.com wrote:
>>> Iridium suffered from the dot com meltdown melting
>>> down the disposable incomes of millions of tech
>>> workers... the dot com meltdown was caused by the
>>> TCRA of 1998.
>>
>> Pardon my ignorance, but what's the TCRA?
>
> TeleCommunications Reform Act of 1998. It essentially
> killed the 'last mile' of fiber optic deployment by telling
> telecoms that they had to give their competitors access
> to their residential fiber optic customers for less than
> their cost, so the telecoms decided not to do it.

While I believe the TCRA helped lay the groundwork for the Dot-Com Bust,
I don't think it's the only or even the biggest factor.  I tend to side
more with the view presented in "Does Austrian Business Cycle Theory
Help Explain the Dot-Com Boom and Bust?" by Gene Callahan and Roger W.
Garrison (in _Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics_ 6(2) [Summer
2003]).  In other words, I think inflation (and moral hazards caused by
Federal bailouts during the 1990s) created a boom that inexorably had to
result in a bust.

That said, do you really believe the TCRA alone lead to the Dot-Com
Bust?  What other factors were involved?

Later!

Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/~neptune/MyWorksBySubject.html