The technological shift to everything electronic and accessible at the click of a mouse has made our world shrink, increased potential entrepreneurial endeavors, and has expanded our expectations, tastes, and standards for entertainment and businesses. These are all great things that have allowed us to become educated about things we would have normally never learned about and has also strengthened our competitive market economy by making comparative shopping extremely easy.

The concern I have with the ease of duplication, thus the lower and lower prices of software, music, movies, literature, etc. is that the incentives to create and innovate will slowly diminish and people will be less inclined financially to develop the things that we as a society have come to love and deem as the rewards of being successful and affluent. Or just purely the need for entertainment and enjoyment. Applying a simple economical concept: the multiplier effect; if innovations are not rewarded with the driving force of a capitalist economy (money), there will be less spending from consumers, eventually leading to less financial incentive for producers and a slowing production of technology, GOOD music, GOOD movies, GOOD literature, new small businesses etc.

Basically, even though it is extremely nice to be able to find almost anything I want on the web for free with enough digging, we might need to see a change in security standards for file sharing, registration and (gasp) paid subscriptions to certain websites to maintain the quality standards required to satisfy our wants. Some of these ideas are already in progress and have been tried, please keep in mind, these suggestions are just some random thoughts from a beginning AP Econ teacher enjoying the content of your blog and website.