Bad Security Driving Out the Good

Bruce Schneier has up at Wired a typically thoughtful piece on how, in the security market as in others, the lemons are winning out over the good products. Schneier harks back to "The Market For Lemons," the 1970s work of economist George Akerlof, to explain why the market's invisible hand pushes most of the best products into the abyss: "With so many mediocre security products on the market, and the difficulty of coming up with a strong quality signal, vendors don't have strong incentives to invest in developing good products. And the vendors that do tend to die a quiet and lonely death."

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Re:This story 2400 years old.

[kisrael]

The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound.
Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book,
and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching."
--Assyrian tablet, c. 2800 BCE (allegedly)