FOSS Development As Economic Stimulus

heybus writes "Economist Dean Baker, best known for calling the housing bust and warning of the ensuing economic collapse, has just published his recommendations for how to allocate President-elect Obama's estimated $800 billion economic stimulus plan. Among other things, Baker calls for juicing the economy with $2 billion worth of government spending to support the development of free and open source software. Baker's idea is similar to the New Deal federal arts and writers' projects: the government would fund projects as long as they produce freely available code. In addition to employing programmers, 'the savings [to consumers] in the United States alone could easily exceed the cost of supporting software development.'"

Comments

Re:nope

[AceJohnny]

Capitalist economics doesn't work like that. Money that consumers don't spend doesn't contribute to GDP, but money they do spend does, and GDP is the magic number (remember, we're all happier when the numbers go up).

That's actually the broken window fallacy. If someone breaks your window, they're helping the economy because you will then spend money to buy a new window and pay a worker to install it for you.

But actually what's happening is that resources that would go into something productive for the economy get diverted to replacing something previously existent, thus reducing economic growth.