James Tauber's Blog 2006/04/16
The Wealth of Networks and Non-markets
I've just started reading Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom online, although I will probably pick up a printed copy at some stage.
It's fascinating so far but I was immediately confused by Benkler's frequent use of the term "non-market" which, in context, seems to suggest he has a much narrower sense of what the "market" is than I've come across before.
For example, consider the following quote (from the first chapter summary on the book's wiki):
Freedom and justice is best achieved through a combination of market action and private, voluntary (thought not necessarily charitable) nonmarket action. The state in this theory is a relatively suspect actor.
I'm not sure what he means by "market" if private, voluntary action is "nonmarket".
by jtauber : Created on April 16, 2006 : Last modified April 16, 2006 : Categories economics books : 3 comments (permalink)
Getting less to work with UTF-8
I've been working with UTF-8 files on the 'nix command-line for years, most recently on OS X.
I've been frustrated that things like cat and head work fine once Terminal is set to display UTF-8 but less doesn't seem to recognize UTF-8 even in that case.
I finally got around asking Google for a solution.
20 seconds later, I found it:
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
via Notes on UTF-8 and locales
Boy do I feel stupid for not just looking it up earlier!
Anyway, maybe someone else will find that useful to know :-)
by jtauber : Created on April 16, 2006 : Last modified April 16, 2006 : 3 comments (permalink)