Sinclair Davidson – Page 3

The digital consequences of the pandemic

With Darcy WE Allen, Sinclair Davidson, Aaron M Lane, and Jason Potts. Originally a Medium post.

The global policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been extraordinary. We’ve seen a massive increase in government spending and social welfare programs, heavy handed policing, and some less remarked on crisis deregulation.

But the long run effect of the pandemic will be even more substantial. COVID-19 is driving far deeper, and profound, changes in the economy.

Some of these changes we can start to see already, but their full implications are still murky and distant. Nonetheless, as we argue in our book Unfreeze: How to Create a High Growth Economy After the Pandemic, the economy will not simply snap back into place. The post-COVID-19 economy will not look like the pre-COVID-19 economy.

Here we offer seven changes that have big consequences for policymakers, entrepreneurs, and employees.

1 — Digital acceleration

COVID-19 has massively accelerated the adoption of digital technology to facilitate work from home. But also shop from home, school from home, telehealth, and so on.

This digital shift is often remarked on but not well understood. Technology adoption normally follows a particular diffusion trajectory. Digital technologies that have significant scale effects must overcome behavioural and institutional resistance, and they can get stuck at take-off. This means that the productivity benefits from widespread technology adoption, especially infrastructural and production technology, can be very slow to realise.

COVID-19 arrived at a critical time in the history of technology — when a supercluster of digital technologies were forming, poised to disrupt the underlying infrastructure of the economy. This suite of digital platforms and technologies had been developing for the past several decades. But they had run into innovation constraints caused by coordination adoption problems and regulatory barriers.

In March 2020, many of these constraints suddenly vanished. The spread of online education and telemedicine, which had been until then a multi-decade process, occurred in a matter of weeks.

This was a massive, global, multisector, virtually-instantaneous coordinated adoption of digital technology. That’s utterly incredible — and perhaps unique in the history of technology adoption.

A major problem with platform technologies is to drive coordinated adoption. The pandemic did in a few weeks what decades of government effort had failed to do. Long-run that is very good. But short-run it is highly disruptive.

2 — A need for massive entrepreneurial adjustment

In Unfreeze we argue that there is an urgent need for entrepreneurs to adapt to the post-COVID-19 world. Economies are made of connections, information, contracts, webs of value, relationships. When we try to restart the economy, much of this connective tissue will be gone.

The rapid technological acceleration driven by the crisis creates its own unique needs for adaptation. We’re already seeing the formation of new consumer preferences, new types of jobs, new types of business models with new cost and demand structures, new patterns of supply, and new regulatory and legal uncertainties.

But this implies that a significant amount of human capital and physical capital (built for industrial era technologies and business models) has rapidly devalued.

The first priority for entrepreneurs in the post-COVID-19 economy will be understanding how particular markets and jobs and administrative functions have changed. For example, many restaurants have moved to take-away only. Will consumers expect those new services to continue? Much of the white-collar economy has moved to work from home. Will employees demand that continues?

Entrepreneurial skills are essential during periods of rapid change. Entrepreneurship is not something that can be supplied by governments. But it can be inhibited. Policymakers have to make sure they are facilitating — not impeding — entrepreneurial adaptation to the accelerated digital adoption triggered by COVID-19.

3 — Decentralised production and innovation

One consequence of this sudden digital uptake is increased decentralisation. With the rapid adoption of work from home — not just the technologies but the social practices — we’ve seen a shift in the locus of much economic activity from offices into homes.

This shift has several implications. One, it facilitates greater co-production of value. More household resources, including especially local information, are being mixed into production.

Two, this also shifts the sites of innovation, facilitating greater household innovation and user innovation. More innovation occurs in the commons rather than in markets and organisations. This in turn increases the need for trusted decentralised networks and, in turn, increases the demand for and use of distributed innovation technology and institutions.

Three, distributed production will require more distributed dispute resolution mechanisms. Traditional courts have been slow to adapt to the digital environment and parties will be looking to more agile forms of alternative dispute resolution.

Four, because more production and innovation is occurring in households and in the commons, this means that it is harder to measure value creation and improvements in these non-market contexts. The non-market part of the economy will increase in apparent scale. So our industrial era measurements of economic activity (like GDP) will need to catch up with these new digital era realities of value creation.

This new institutional economic order will require a new economics to make sense of these new patterns of consumption and production, and new digital forms of capital and value creation.

4 — Powered-up economic evolution

The pandemic is a selection filter. As the precursor and mechanism of many of these changes, the economic consequence of the economic policy response to the viral pandemic is a powerful evolutionary selection mechanism passing over the global economy and through each sector.

This brutal selection mechanism is causing job losses, contract terminations or renegotiations, demand reductions, business closures and bankruptcy, fire sales, credit shrinkage, asset repricing, factor substitution, and other distinct forms of economic destruction that will play out over the coming months and years.

This hard evolutionary selection mechanism is also a filter. It will kill off some things disproportionately and let other things pass through. Most obviously, digitally enabled businesses and sectors will do better, because they are more well-adapted to the new environment. Bigger firms with better capitalisation (or better political connections) will do better, and smaller firms will be selected against.

In labour markets some positions are more vulnerable than others, particularly part-time workers or contractors. While many workers and firms are on temporary support through public sector subsidy of wages or quasi-partial nationalisations, a proportion of those positions or organisations being kept alive will die as soon as support is removed. There are many zombies already.

Similarly, there will be a lot of bad debt on company books (and thereby in banks) that will be realised in market revaluations over coming periods. These collapses will release resources for subsequent entrepreneurial reconstitution and reinvention.

But we should also expect consolidation of existing markets and resources among surviving players. This may actually result in higher growth and profits among large adaptive companies — particularly technology driven companies. So a period of global economic destruction is not inconsistent with a booming share market.

5 — The twilight of conventional macroeconomic policy

At the same time, COVID-19 looks to fundamentally break the standard monetary and fiscal policy levers that have been used to manage business cycles over the twentieth century.

From a public finance perspective, the magnitude of the committed policy actions is already unprecedented. The levels of public debt that are planned in order to deal with this crisis — the policies to subsidise wages, provide rent and income relief, bail out companies, etc in order to avoid market catastrophe — are the largest that has ever been experienced. Moreover, these actions are being taken during a massive collapse in tax receipts. The implications for public finance are catastrophic, with a huge increase in public debt, a vastly worse central bank balance sheet, and looming inflation.

The result is a policy challenge that far exceeds capabilities of traditional monetary and fiscal levers. We will require institutional policy reforms to deal with the crisis. But institutional policy designed to free-up the supply side of the economy, to lower the costs and constraints on businesses, is politically much harder to achieve.

Indeed, the limits of these policy levers reveals the extent to which government administration (e.g. of money, of asset and property registries, of identity, of regulation and governance) is still the foundation of a modern economy. The pandemic has brought into sharp relief the limits and constraints of this centralised public infrastructure and the technocratic foundations of the macroeconomic policy mechanisms built upon them.

The real alternative to conventional policy levers isn’t different policies (like quantitative easing, negative interest rates, or universal basic income) but better institutional technologies. We’ve been looking in the past few years at distributed digital technology (that is, blockchain) that offers a new administrative and governance base layer of the economy (see here, here, here, here and here to start).

A digital infrastructure base layer of industry utilities and digital platforms would provide a far more agile foundation for targeted economic policy and entrepreneurial adaptation.

6 — A new global trading order

One of the most powerful institutional forces over the past several centuries, and which has underpinned global economic prosperity in the industrial era, was the development of global trading infrastructure for commodities and capital. It was built around the Westphalian system of nation-state record-keeping and intra-nation state treaty-based institutional governance (i.e. trade zones). But it has come to a virtual halt in the crisis.

In the short and medium term the global trading order will rebuild around a different order, namely provable health identity and data to facilitate the safe movement and interaction of people. Where that can safely happen, so can economic activity. Health zones can become the basis for trade zones. Australia and New Zealand are already talking about a “health bubble”. It would be easy to include other highly successful health economies — Taiwan, Japan, Germany, potentially Hong Kong and Singapore, some Pacific Island nations.

Green zones (or cordon sanitaire) have long been used in pandemics and have once again been proposed as a way to exit lockdown. As the health zone grows, so can the trade zone. Economic zones can then free ride on the decentralised identity and data infrastructure created to build a health zone. The result will be the redrawing of physical and network boundaries, even eliminating artificial economic borders, to create integrated trade zones.

7 — A new political order

The costs of COVID-19 do not fall evenly across the population. The health risks fall heavily on some groups (the elderly and those with co-morbidities), and the costs of economic lockdown fall on different groups and will be felt differently. The differential impact by sector, jobs, education, human capital investments or physical or financial capital write-downs shape how the costs are distributed across society.

The virus imposes huge private costs that will be in part socialised through political bargaining. The outcome of these politically mediated bargains and transfers that will shape politics for years to come.

But the pandemic also shifts some of the anchor points of political economy. The sudden growth of the welfare state, of unemployment insurance and wage-support, of healthcare provision and childcare, even of social housing are unlikely to be easily rolled back. So there will be a higher demand for social welfare safety nets.

But to pay for this, along with the urgent need to address the huge deterioration of public balance sheets, economic policy will need an aggressive pro-market agenda to unleash economic growth. Politically, this is a pivot to the centre with very ‘dry’ economic policy and ‘wet’ social policy — what was called ‘third way’ in the 1990s.

The counterpoint to that centre-pivot is that many of the high-cost political projects of both the right and the left will be abandoned. Reduced economic growth means we can afford fewer of the luxuries of advanced capitalism.

This is a vision of a new kind of social-digital capitalism to be built after the reset — from the government-led physical infrastructure of the industrial era, to a digital era built on private, open and communally developed technology platforms.

Finally

The economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are mostly currently being discussed as a macro policy response to dealing with the economic destruction that the public health strategy necessitates. This is talk of the V-shaped, U-shaped, L-shaped or W-shaped recoveries. In Unfreeze we wrote of the need for a square root shaped recovery — after the reopening, we’ll need a long period of high economic growth to return to the prosperity of 2019.

But here we’ve gone further. COVID-19 is driving structural evolutionary change in the economy. The accelerated adoption of digital economic infrastructure during the crisis will leave a lasting mark on the political and economic system of the future.

Unfreeze: How to create a high growth economy after the pandemic

With Darcy WE Allen, Sinclair Davidson, Aaron M Lane and Jason Potts. American Institute for Economic Research, 2020

During March and early April 2020, much of the world economy was deliberately shut-down and frozen to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Modern economies are complex systems that are not easily frozen and unfrozen. Governments now face the challenge of unfreezing their economies. The social and economic cost of the pandemic will be enormous and long-lasting. This book develops an analytic and policy framework—cryoeconomics—for understanding what needs to happen next and how to restore our standard of living. We spell out the policy settings necessary for the rapid adaptation and market re-coordination that is required to resuscitate the economy. We explain why a return to business as usual is simply not enough to get everyone working again. A period of high growth prosperity will be imperative to deal with the costs of the freeze. This book tackles the tough questions and fills some of the current void of ideas and thinking about economic recovery. We develop a framework and principles for an institutional re-build, presenting a path to recovery based on the ideas of private governance, permissionless innovation, and entrepreneurial dynamism.

Available at Amazon in print and Kindle and Amazon Australia in Kindle edition.

Cryoeconomics: how to unfreeze the economy

With Darcy Allen, Sinclair Davidson, Aaron Lane and Jason Potts. Originally a Medium post.

The Australian government, like many governments around the world, wants to freeze the economy while it tackles the coronavirus pandemic. This is what the Commonwealth’s JobKeeper payments and bailout packages are supposed to do: hold workers in place and keep employment relationships together until mandatory social distancing ends.

Easier said than done. We are in completely uncharted territory. We’ve never tried to freeze an economy before, let alone tried to thaw it out a few weeks or months later. That’s why our new project, cryoeconomics, looks at the economics of unfreezing an economy.

To understand why this will be so hard, think of an economy as a remarkably complex pattern of relationships. Those relationships are not only between employees and employers, but also between borrowers and lenders, between shareholders and companies, between landlords and tenants, between producers tied together on supply chains, and between brands and tastemakers and their fans.

The patterns that make up our economy weren’t designed from above. They evolved from the distributed decisions of consumers and producers, and are shaped by the complex interaction between the supply of goods and services and their demand.

The problem is that the patterns the government plans to freeze are not the patterns we will need when they finally let us thaw.

When the government decides to pull the economy out of hibernation, the world will look very different. As a simple example, it’s quite possible that many Australians, forced to stay home rather than eat out, discover they love to cook. This will influence the demand for restaurants at the end of the crisis. On the other hand, our pent-up desire for active social lives might get us out into the hospitality sector with some enthusiasm. There will be drastic changes because of global supply chain disruptions and government policies. These changes will be exacerbated by the fact that not all countries will be unfrozen at the same time.

The upshot is that the economy which the government is trying to hibernate is an economy designed for the needs and preferences of a society that has not suffered through a destructive pandemic.

Unfreezing the economy is going to be extremely disruptive. New patterns will have to be discovered. As soon as the JobKeeper payments end, many of the jobs that they have frozen in place will disappear. And despite the government’s efforts, many economic relationships will have been destroyed.

Yet there will also be new economic opportunities — new demands from consumers, and new expectations. Digital services and home delivery will no doubt be more popular than they were before.

These disruptions will be unpredictable — particularly if, as we expect, the return to work is gradual and staggered (perhaps according to health and age considerations or access to testing).

As we unfreeze, the problem facing the economy won’t primarily be how to stimulate an amorphous ‘demand’ (as many economists argue government should respond to a normal economic recession) but how to rapidly discover new economic patterns.

It is here that over-regulation is a major problem. So much of the laws and regulations imposed by the government assume the existence of particular economic patterns — particular ways of doing things. Those regulations can inhibit our ability to adjust to new circumstances.

In the global response to the crisis there has already been a lot of covert deregulations. The most obvious are around medical devices and testing. A number of regulatory agencies have stood down some rules temporarily to allow companies to respond to the crisis more flexibly. The Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority is now willing to let banks hold less capital. The Australian Securities and Investment Commission has dropped some of its most intrusive corporate surveillance programs.

The deregulatory responses we’ve seen so far relate to how we can freeze the economy. A flexible regulatory environment is even more critical as we unfreeze. Anything that prevents businesses from adapting and rehiring staff according to the needs of the new economic pattern will keep us poorer, longer.

Today the government is focused on fighting the public health crisis. But having now turned a health crisis into an economic crisis, it must quickly put in place an adaptive regulatory environment to enable people and businesses to discover what a post-freeze economy looks like.

Age of currency disruption is here

With Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts

It is unusual for the World Economic Forum’s Davos conference, held every year at the end of January, to be genuinely significant. But it seems this one was. Davos 2020 made clear that we are now living through a monetary reform era comparable to the great monetary events of the twentieth century.

The end of the gold standard, the creation of the Bretton Woods system in 1944, and that system’s collapse in the 1970s all brought about massive, structural economic changes. Our new age – the age of digital money competition – is likely to be just as disruptive.

At Davos the World Economic Forum announced a global consortium for the cross-border governance of digital currencies (including the class of cryptocurrencies stabilised against fiat money known as ‘stablecoins’) and a toolkit for the world’s central banks to establish their own digital central bank currencies.

The details of these Davos initiatives are less important than what they symbolise. Central banks have been experimenting with fully digital currencies for at least half a decade, ever since Bitcoin received its first big waves of press. But their experiments are suddenly urgent, for both commercial and geopolitical reasons.

On the one side, the Facebook-led Libra digital currency project offers a vision of corporate-sponsored non-state private money. On the other side, China is fast-tracking the development of a fully digital yuan, with a barely disguised goal to challenge the American dollar’s domination through technological innovation. Both projects create enormous problems for the rest of the world’s central banks – let alone finance regulators and foreign policy strategists.

Libra has been faced with a concerted hostile attack from central banks and regulators – an attack that begun literally the day it was announced in June last year. Many of the Libra consortium have been pressured into withdrawing from the project.

Mastercard, Stripe and Visa withdrew after they received a letter from US Senators in October declaring that if they stayed in Libra they could “expect a high level of scrutiny from regulators not only on Libra-related payment activities, but on all payment activities”. The Bank of France chief declared last week that “Currency cannot be private, money is a public good of sovereignty”, and the French finance minister has warned that Libra is not welcome in Europe.

This mafia-like behaviour from American and European regulators is short-sighted – astonishingly so. Whether Libra ends up being a successful global corporate currency or not, it represents a powerful and competitive counterbalance to the Chinese digital yuan.

Details have been dribbling out about the digital yuan since it was revealed in August last year. Its key feature is that it is fully centralised. The People’s Bank of China will have complete visibility over over financial flows, including the ability to control transactions tied to an individual consumer’s identity. This offers China the digital infrastructure for a type of financial repression that is without historical parallel.

And adoption is basically assured. The Chinese government can coerce financial institutions to adopt the digital yuan, if necessary, and can exploit the remarkably strong hold that digital payments like WeChat Pay and AliPay have on Chinese commerce.

Let us hope there are some serious strategists thinking about what happens if this digital currency becomes part of China’s foreign policy toolkit – what the consequences of yuan-isation will be for those countries torn between the Chinese and American spheres of influence.

This is the context in which the many of the world’s central bankers came to Davos to spruik their own digital currencies. More than 50 central banks surveyed by the Bank of International Settlements are working on some form of digital currency, and half a dozen have moved to the pilot project stage. Our Reserve Bank told a Senate committee in January that it too has been secretly working on an all-digital Australian dollar.

And of course in the background to this monetary competition between the corporate sector and the government sector is the slowly growing adoption of fully decentralised cryptocurrencies – the decade-old technology that first sparked these waves of monetary innovation.

The global monetary system of 2020s will be a regulatory and financial contest between these three forms of all-digital money: central bank digital currencies, corporate digital currencies, and cryptocurrencies. The contest has profound significance for the ability for governments to control capital flows across international borders, for financial privacy, for tax collection, and obviously monetary policy.

China has the authoritarian power to force adoption of its central bank digital currency. Countries like Australia do not. So it is not obvious which form of money will eventually dominate.

National governments have had nearly absolute control over national currencies for at least a hundred years, in some cases much longer.

The end of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s incited a generation of economic reform, as domestic policymakers discovered that Bretton Woods had been propping up all sorts of regulatory controls, trade barriers and even labour restrictions.

We’re about to discover what centuries of state monopoly over money has propped up.

Identity technologies: A transaction cost approach

With Sinclair Davidson and Jason Potts

Abstract: Identity is an input into economic exchange and contracting. The modern industrial economy has relies on cheap political identity to create trust and lower transaction costs. Market economies, however, have different identity needs than an administrative state. Economic efficiency in a digital economy requires high-quality economic identity to facilitate co-production of value on platforms, and to enable market competition through product-quality discrimination. Blockchain technologies and related advances are bringing innovation to economic identity technology. In this paper we explore state-produced identity and market-produced identity, the dynamics that exist in their demand and supply, how these categories are being shaped by technological change, the implications for privacy and secrecy, and the role of the state in market-produced identity.

Available at SSRN.

Blockchain and Investment: An Austrian Approach

Abstract: Investment is a function of expected profit, which involves calculation of the cost of trust. Blockchain technology is a new institutional technology (Davidson et al 2018) that industrialises trust (Berg et al 2018). We therefore expect that the adoption of blockchain technology into the economy will affect investment and capital structure. Using a broad Austrian economic approach, we examine how blockchain technology will affect the cost of trust, patterns of investment, and economic institutions.

Working paper available at SSRN.

Author(s): Darcy W. E. Allen, Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts

Journal: The Review of Austrian Economics

Vol: 34 Year: 2021 Pages: 149–162

DOI: 10.1007/s11138-020-00504-x

Cite: Allen, Darcy W. E., Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, and Jason Potts. “Blockchain and Investment: An Austrian Approach.” The Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 34, 2021, pp. 149–162.

Proof of work as a three sided market

Abstract: Blockchain technology is the distributed, decentralised ledger technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We apply Oliver Williamson’s transactions cost analysis to the blockchain consensus mechanism. Blockchains reduce the costs of opportunism but are not ‘trustless’. We show that blockchains are trust machines. Blockchains are platforms for three-sided bargaining that convert energy-intensive computation into economically-valuable trust.

Author(s): Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts

Journal: Frontiers in Blockchain

Vol: 3 Year: 2020 Article: 2

DOI: 10.3389/fbloc.2020.00002

Cite: Berg, Chris, Sinclair Davidson, and Jason Potts. “Proof of Work as a Three-Sided Market.” Frontiers in Blockchain, vol. 3, 2020, article 2.

Blockchain technology as economic infrastructure: Revisiting the electronic markets hypothesis

Abstract: In the late 1980s and early 1990s the electronic markets hypothesis offered a prediction about effect of information technology on industrial organisation, and many business writers forecast significant changes to the shape and nature of the firm. However, these changes did not come to pass. This paper provides an economic analysis of why, using the transaction cost economic framework of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson. Non-hierarchical corporate organisation struggled against contracting problems in the presence of possible opportunistic behaviour. Technologies of trust offer an institutional mechanism that acts on the margin of trust, suppressing opportunism. The paper concludes that blockchain technology provides an economic infrastructure for the coordination of economic activity and the possible realisation of the electronic markets hypothesis.

Author(s): Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts

Journal: Frontiers in Blockchain

Vol: 2 Year: 2019 Article: 22

DOI: 10.3389/fbloc.2019.00022

Cite: Berg, Chris, Sinclair Davidson, and Jason Potts. “Blockchain Technology as Economic Infrastructure: Revisiting the Electronic Markets Hypothesis.” Frontiers in Blockchain, vol. 2, 2019, article 22.

Selling Your Data without Selling Your Soul: Privacy, Property, and the Platform Economy

With Sinclair Davidson

Executive summary: Humans have always sought to defend a zone of privacy around themselves—to protect their personal information, their intimate actions and relationships, and their thoughts and ideas from the scrutiny of others. However, it is now common to hear that thanks to digital technologies, we now have little expectation of privacy over our personal information.

Meanwhile, the economic value of personal information is rapidly growing as data becomes a key input to economic activity. A major driver of this change is the rise of a new form of business organization that has come to dominate the economy—platforms that can accumulate and store data and information are likely to make that data and information more valuable.

Given the growing economic importance of data, digital privacy has come to the fore as a major public policy issue. Yet, there is considerable confusion in public debates over the meaning of privacy and why it has become a public policy concern. A poor foundational understanding of privacy is likely to result in poor policy outcomes, including excessive regulatory costs, misallocated resources, and a failure to achieve intended goals.

This paper explores how to build a right to privacy that gives individuals more control over their personal data, and with it a choice about how much of their privacy to protect. It makes the case that privacy is an economic right that has largely not emerged in modern economies.

Regulatory attempts to improve individual control over personal information, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), have unintended consequences and are unlikely to achieve their goals. The GDPR is a quasi-global attempt to institute privacy protections over personal data through regulation. As an attempt to introduce a form of ownership over personal data, it is unwieldy and complex and unlikely to achieve its goals. The GDPR supplants the ongoing social negotiation around the appropriate ownership of personal data and presents a hurdle to future innovation.

In contrast to top-down approaches like the GDPR, the common law provides a framework for the discovery and evolution of rules around privacy. Under a common law approach, problems such as privacy are solved on a case-by-case basis, drawing on and building up a stock of precedent that has more fidelity to real-world dilemmas than do planned regulatory frameworks.

New technologies such as distributed ledger technology—blockchain—and advances in zero-knowledge proofs likewise provide an opportunity for entrepreneurs to improve privacy without top-down regulation and law.

Privacy is key to individual liberty. Individuals require control over their own private information in order to live autonomous and flourishing lives. While free individuals expose information about themselves in the course of social and economic activity, public policy should strive to ensure they do so only with their own implied or explicit consent.

The ideal public policy setting is one in which individuals have property rights over personal information and can control and monetize their own data. The common law, thanks to its case-by-case, evolutionary nature, is more likely to provide a sustainable and adaptive framework by which we can approach data privacy questions.

Published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute

Capitalism after Satoshi

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the long-run economic structure and economic policy consequences of wide-spread blockchain adoption.

Design/methodology/approach: The approach uses institutional, organisational and evolutionary economic theory to predict consequences of blockchain innovation for economic structure (dehierarchicalisation) and then to further predict the effect of that structural change on the demand for economic policy.

Findings: The paper makes two key predictions. First, that blockchain adoption will cause both market disintermediation and organisational dehierarchicalisation. And second, that these structural changes will unwind some of the rationale for economic policy developed through the twentieth century that sought to control the effects of market power and organisational hierarchy.

Research limitations/implications: The core implication that the theoretical prediction made in this paper is that wide-spread blockchain technology adoption could reduce the need for counter-veiling economic policy, and therefore limiting the role of government.

Originality/value: The paper takes a standard prediction made about blockchain adoption, namely disintermediation (or growth of markets), and extends it to point out that the same effect will occur to organisations. It then notes that much of the rationale for economic policy, and especially industry and regulatory policy through the twentieth century was justified in order to control economic power created by hierarchical organisations. The surprising implication, then, is that blockchain adoption weakens the rationale for such economic policy. This reveals the long-run relationship between digital technological innovation and the regulatory state.

Author(s): Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts

Journal: Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy

Vol: 9 Issue: 2 Year: 2020 Pages: 152–164

DOI: 10.1108/JEPP-03-2019-0012 and at SSRN

Cite: Berg, Chris, Sinclair Davidson, and Jason Potts. “Capitalism after Satoshi: Blockchains, Dehierarchicalisation, Innovation Policy, and the Regulatory State.” Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy, vol. 9, no. 2, 2020, pp. 152–164.