IP: more on Did Telecom Reformers Dial the Wrong Number?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Vaughan Pratt <pratt () cs Stanford EDU>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2002 09:51:18 -0700
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Cc: pratt () cs Stanford EDU
Subject: Re: IP: Did Telecom Reformers Dial the Wrong Number?


Dave,

To make the charge stick that deregulation caused the meltdown, Hiltzik
and Peltz would need to demonstrate one of two consequences of leaving the
regulation in place.

    (a) The economy would not have heated up as much; or

    (b) The heat the economy attained by the end of 1999 was stable.

To show (a) they would need to argue that the explosive deployment
between 1995 and 1999 of wildly popular telecom technologies such as
cellular
and the Internet contributed significantly less to the economic temperature
than deregulation.

To prove (b) they would need to propose either a regulation-related
mechanism
by which the rapid expansion characterizing the end of the last millennium
would have rapidly leveled off shortly into the present one in an
economically
sustainable way, or the perpetual continuation of an exponentially growing
population of greater fools.

On which leg does their argument stand?  Looks to me like it doesn't have
one.

Vaughan Pratt



------ End of Forwarded Message

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