Some economic ideas are just too silly -- too stupid even -- to be taken seriously. No, this isn't a reference to Marxist ideas about how badly the capitalists rip us off.
The capitalists get about 10% of everything and if we're more than 10% richer because we live in a capitalist society, then we win. The capitalist societies are more than 10% richer than the socialist ones so we win from capitalism -- that's simple.
No, there are results from economic research that just, well, don't work intuitively. We read them and think, well, no, that can't be right.
But what if they are?
There's a professor at Stanford University, Erik Brynjolfsson, who says that Facebook is worth $600 a year to each user.
That free email and search -- so, Google -- is worth $18,000 (yes, 18 thousand) to each of us.
Clearly, this is ridiculous -- most of us don't earn $18,000 a year so how can just a part of the internet be worth that to us?
Yet his research is as good as it gets. He runs experiments testing how much people would have to be paid to not have these things. Those are the results from those experiments. We can say, well, he's talking about Americans, not the rest of us, and that's fair.
There's one little story from Iran that makes me think, well, maybe he's right.
In the current difficulties the Iranian government had, essentially, closed down the internet. They've also imported from China (apparently a swap of oil for equipment from Huawei) a system that allows a paid access to some fraction of the internet.
Persians cannot check X, or Instagram, but Telegram works. So a subset of the internet that we all get. The result is that people are paying up to 50% of their daily income in order to gain this -- limited - internet access.
We must be careful here. This is not data or proof, it's a story. Some people are doing this, not everyone is.
On the other hand, I have worked with Iranian newspapers and am being told that this is a real thing, something happening, not just one or two people.
So far that's just a story about how some -- few -- Iranians value access to Telegram. But now think about what it means for the Brynjolfsson research.
We do not have to accept the total figures but we really should agree that some people find that these things we get free from the internet are valuable. Properly valuable, whole percentages of income, not just little nice to haves on the side.
But if that's true, then what does this say about inequality in recent decades?
If everyone has free access to these same valuable things, then that reduces inequality. $600 a year, free -- that value of Facebook -- to a poor person is worth much more than $600 a year to a rich person.
So, by these calculations, life as it is actually lived, the value that everyone gets to consume, increases more for the poor than the rich -- inequality has fallen.
Now, to return to what we said at the top. Some economic ideas are just too silly -- too stupid even -- to be taken seriously. Well, yes, this is true.
But the difficult thing is, as always in life, to work out which are the silly ideas. Is inequality falling because we all now get free stuff online? Or is inequality increasing as some like to say? What we do about the world rather depends upon which we take to be the stupid idea.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.