Kuznet’s Curve
Another place Kuznets type curves appear is the environment. It is claimed that many environmental health indicators, such as water and air pollution, show the inverted U-shape: in the beginning of economic development, little weight is given to environmental concerns, raising pollution along with industrialization. After a threshold, when basic physical needs are met, interest in a clean environment rises, reversing the trend. Now society has the funds, as well as willingness to spend to reduce pollution.
Eric Schmidt’s comments on click fraud being ’self correcting’ has to be looked at as a terrible PR blunder for Google.
There is a much bigger problem to click fraud than just advertisers maintaining an “efficient buy”. In the Web 2.0 world of easily being able to create content; spam, spammers, and the other people making money in fraudulent ways are creating a system that can potentially cripple the net we know.
Schmidt claiming efficiency in this case, is like the cost-benefit analysis Ford had used for the Pinto to compare the cost of an $11 repair against the cost of paying off potential law suits. Regardless of how inefficient other mediums of advertising are, “we are right, you are wrong” economic efficiency talk does nothing good for the ecology of the net.
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