Education in the Digital Age

How We Get There

Nadav Zeimer

• Publisher: Nadav Zeimer
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780578661414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

What skills are recession-proof? How should you prepare your high school student or an uncertain future?

• Learn why jobs are in decline and what will replace them
• Understand how digital media production will replace some standardized testing
• Gain insight into how digital technology trends such as decentralization and open source could collide to challenge the nation’s largest corporations
• Study the history of economic trends and inquire into whether America is bound for totalitarian corporate rule or a drastic expansion of democratic values
• Explore the research on human bias and discover why anti-bias is crucial for economic growth
• Delve into the limits of artificial intelligence and how a digital native future inverts its role in society
• Question whether surveillance capitalism is something we should worry about

Digital Platforms Are the Most Profitable Companies on the Planet, and Poised to Transform Education …
A former software engineer, Principal Zeimer takes readers through an in-depth evaluation of how digital technology and economics are poised to transform education by examining the concept of academic capital.

A MINDSET SHIFT
FROM: INDUSTRIAL TO: DIGITAL

FROM: Students are consumers of information
TO: Students are producers of academic content (the heart of academic capital)

FROM: More stuff represents prosperity
TO: Human attention (active users) represent prosperity

FROM: Students identify “correct” answer as fast as possible
TO: Students think critically about questions that they design

FROM: Broadcasting
TO: Narrowcasting

FROM: Boss decides what to produce which is pushed to consumers with marketing (“supply side”)
TO: Users decide what to produce and they pull items into existence (“Demand side”)

FROM: It costs money to distribute goods and services leading to economies of scale (monopoly dynamics)
TO: Distribution is free and instant leading to network effects (winner-takes-all dynamics)

FROM: Security means armed guards and guns, stormtroopers
TO: Security means encryption, hackers

FROM: Ownership (owning capital leads to profits / Zero-sum dynamics)
TO: Sharing (Uber has no cars, Airbnb no homes, AliBaba no stores / positive-sum dynamics)

FROM: The corporation / “having a job” / centralized
TO: The Platform / “doing work” / crowdsourced

FROM: Movement of physical atoms of stuff
TO: Movement of electrons

FROM: Groupthink of the executive team
TO: “Mass identities” manipulate “the crowd”

Guaranteed to capture the hearts ofreaders interested in bitcoin, education, or basic income.
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#DNAcredits | A New

PART I | SCARCITY AND VALUE:

End of the Industrial Age, Birth of the Digital Age,
and Implications of Rapid Change

Chapter 1 | Abstraction Plus Crowd

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

—Victor Hugo

Digital economies are built on a combination of abstraction and crowdsourcing. Without understanding this, we cannot understand the digital economy nor prepare our high school graduates to pursue freedom in a digital age.

A digital native taxi platform like Lyft owns no taxis: it is built on the abstraction of rides in cars represented as words and images on a mobile screen. Similarly, Airbnb monetizes the spare room in your home by making it visible to massive numbers of people using an online abstraction of the physical space being offered.

Financial markets have been using this combination of abstraction and crowdsourcing for some four hundred years in stock and commodity markets with slips of paper representing ownership of a company (stock), or a quantity of pork bellies to be delivered on a specific date (commodity). The price of these paper contracts was determined from the bottom up: from the crowd of buyers and sellers in the market rather than by a singular authority who decreed the prices from the top down. This allowed for speculation and derivative products, which are abstractions of abstractions like insurance policies to protect buyers from market volatility. We have become accustomed to increasing layers of abstraction to the point that information itself has become a commodity in the digital economy with substantial economic value.

The Value of Information

Language is the ultimate abstraction. For example, the word “dog” is a combination of shapes that make letters that form a word and bring to mind a particular kind of animal. Money is an equally remarkable abstraction. We provide work for someone else and receive a form of currency in exchange, which we trust to represent our labor, skill, and experience. Farmers deliver truckloads of a hard-earned harvest and happily accept a small paper check, which abstracts this bounty into a handwritten dollar amount.

With money comes greed: a drive to take advantage of this abstract store of value to acquire wealth without having to work. Greed has driven much innovation, as the search to make gold from other substances led to modern chemistry and to a surprising extent, medicine.i They never did figure out how to turn lead into gold, but they transformed society nonetheless.

After gold coin, the bank note was the second historic level of economic abstraction, representing a quantity of gold coin a customer had in storage at the bank, which represented value of his or her previous work that earned the stored gold. Faced with the Great Depression and with people wanting to redeem their dollars for gold, FDR closed the banks, took all the gold stored in them, and secured it in the Federal Reserve so that banks had no gold to issue. He then forced Americans to turn in their gold, and made the private ownership of gold illegal, which forced everyone to transact in US dollars.ii

In 1971, President Nixon did for the global marketplace what FDR did for domestic finance: he ended dollar convertibility to gold for foreign nations that held US dollars.iii The United States had long had the largest gold reserves in the world, and many nations held dollars instead of gold since the United States could honor their promise to exchange one for the other on demand. By 1968, the US gold reserves had dwindled, and budget deficits resulting from the Vietnam War made foreign holders nervous. When they sought to exchange their dollar reserves for gold in 1971, Nixon refused. By 1973 a new system based on floating exchange rates was in place. Nixon had taken the United States off the gold standard and in so doing he demanded that the global economy value printed paper as a “fiat” currency, one that is not redeemable for any equivalent physical resource: a purely abstract version of the paper bank note that was originally created to represent storage of a physical commodity. No longer.

Government confiscated gold from its citizens, swapped it for paper, and refused to honor the promise that paper money represented equivalent gold held in storage for international trade partners. Citizens and foreign banks didn’t seem to mind as long as the US government promised that these paper bills had market value. This increasing abstraction of labor to gold coin, then of gold coin to paper notes, and the establishment of the US dollar as a global reserve currency after 1971, iv was only possible because people had become so comfortable with abstraction.

Our trust in government’s promise that paper dollars are valuable has remained despite the fact that this promised value has dwindled year after year as more and more money has been printed by successive governments hungry for cash. Someone who saved $100 in a bank in 1971 would have an equivalent purchasing power of about $15 todayv (if you could buy 2,300 eggs with $100 in 1971,vi today you would only be able to buy 336 eggs with that same $100).

The bold action of issuing paper untethered from physical limitations, with private finance backed by public government, ushered in an age where abstract information was beginning to have value unto itself. Numbers printed on dollar bills gained a value of their own. No gold, no shares, no pork bellies—just indelible ink on fancy paper and a government promise. The road to an information revolution was paved as an unintended consequence of the budget deficits faced by FDR and Nixon. This is how greed drove innovation.

Today, many other types of information beyond numbers printed on government bills have real economic value such as the images and descriptions of products on eBay or Amazon, which are backed by eventual delivery of the abstracted product. Abstract information has gained value to the point that it has replaced gold and silver and even paper dollars as the underlying asset class of the digital economy. And this trend is accelerating with a variety of external factors such as fear of viruses that may be transmitted on cash and coins.

Today’s dollars are more often information stored on bank computers allowing us to tap a credit card to make payments without paper bills changing hands or being stored in a bank vault. As of the writing of this book, 65 percent of the top thirty currencies are purely digital representations of money on government sanctioned computers with physical cash and coin comprising only 35 percent of base money.vii We are so comfortable with the value of abstract information that we trust a bunch of electrons and photons zipping from the machine where we swipe our card to the bank computers. The transfer of value involves nothing more than changing information stored on computers. As a result, a bank today is little more than a digital ledger, securing high value account information rather than gold bars or paper bills. Digital encryption is now as important as armed guards.

This shift from the atoms of gold to those of ink on paper to the electrons of a computer database happened quietly, behind the scenes, without most of us paying too much attention. The revolution that began with the birth of bitcoin is not about money going digital—that already happened with credit cards—it is about decentralization and related network effects coming to money as centralized governm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedicated ToOur Teachers
• PART I | SCARCITY AND VALUE: End of the Industrial Age, Birth of the Digital Age, and Implications of Rapid Change
• PART II | THE END OF JOBS: Employment Implications of the Digital Age
• PART III | DIGITAL PLATFORM ECONOMICS: An Economic Organization that Threatens Corporations
• PART IV | DRIVING PROSPERITY: Digital Prosperity—Nuts and Bolts
• PART V | PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: Incentives to Rearrange Secondary Schooling