In 1988, Long before his days as a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Krugman made a bold statement concerning the internet. Specifically, Krugman thought that the internet would have no greater economic impact than the fax machine adding:
“As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.”
He attributed this theory to Metcalfe’s law, which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants. Krugman would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 2008 and the internet would go on to revolutionize the investing industry and become one the most significant technological developments the financial world has ever seen.