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Cato Policy Report, January/February 1998

Cato Sponsors Bionomics Conference

First annual Cato conference in Silicon Valley

Huber.gif (41558 bytes)Don't run to Washington for help in your fight with Microsoft," Peter Huber told Silicon Valley representatives at the 5th Annual Bionomics Conference, titled "Now What? Living with Perpetual Evolution." "As much as you dislike Bill Gates writing your operating system, you'll like Janet Reno writing it a lot less."

Huber, author of Law and Disorder in Cyberspace, estimated that Herbert Hoover's mistake--nationalizing the frequency spectrum rather than letting common law work out ownership rules--might have cost the American economy some $2 trillion in the past seven decades.

The 5th Annual Bionomics Conference, held at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, was the first one cosponsored by the Cato Institute and Forbes ASAP, along with the founding sponsor, the Bionomics Institute. It's projected to be the first of a series of annual Cato conferences in the Silicon Valley area. The conference was organized by Tom W. Bell, Cato's director of telecommunications and technology studies.

Physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford discussed inexpensive ways to deal with the problem of global warming, if it turns out to be a problem, and other ways that technology can improve our lives in the 21st century.

Bionomic insights were provided by Michael Rothschild, author of Bionomics: The Economy as Ecosystem, in his opening remarks, and by other speakers such as Andrew Leonard, author of Bots: The Origin of a New Species, and George Dyson, author of Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. Lila Kari of the University of Western Ontario discussed evolutionary computation.

David Post of the Temple University School of Law explored how rules are evolving on the Internet, in a dramatic form of spontaneous order. Sameer Parekh, the 23-year-old president of C2Net recently pictured on the cover of Forbes, explained the importance of encryption to the future development of electronic commerce.

Virginia Postrel, editor of Reason, discussed the two views of society that are challenging the old left-right distinction. She asserted that the real dividing line in politics is between the advocates of dynamism and the advocates of stasis. Resistance to change unites such seeming adversaries as Pat Buchanan and Richard Gephardt. Rich Karlgaard, editor of Forbes ASAP, discussed the meaning of competition in the new economy; and Cato's David Boaz, author of Libertarianism: A Primer, and writer Paulina Borsook, author of the forthcoming Cyberselfish, debated competition, cooperation, and individualism.

Daniel Klein, editor of Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct, and John Hagel III, author of Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities, both examined how trust can be established among people who don't know each other--an essential prerequisite for doing business over wide areas and extended times.

During a panel on education, Martin Haeberli of Netscape discussed the use of technology in the classroom. Michael Moe of NationsBank Montgomery Securities examined the low return Americans are getting on an investment of $600 billion in education and the ways that for-profit companies are beginning to enter the education business. Former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down, brought down the house with a stem-winding excoriation of compulsory bureaucratic schooling.

José Piñera discussed the worldwide movement toward privatization of government-run pension systems, and Cato president Edward H. Crane closed the conference with a warning to Silicon Valley to avoid getting involved with Washington policymakers.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 1998 edition of Cato Policy Report.