But in Networking Economics 101, when supply goes up, so does demand. He used the hypothetical example of the world's first fax machine to explain the phenomenon. It's that kind of phenomenon that accounts for the 90 percent drop in the cost of a phone call from 1957 to the present, while the cost of consumer goods like the Hershey bar have increased twelvefold and more. Lee also asserted that telephone wires, not television cable, would continue to be the pipeline of choice for high-speed information in the coming decade, despite people's fears that the familiar twisted copper wires inside telephones wouldn't be able to carry heavier loads of information. Lee noted that GTE is providing this new technology to select communities like Redmond, Wash., a suburb of Seattle populated by Microsoft executives.
Telecommunications is the great equalizer because it makes information available to everyone.
While democracies flourish in such an environment, dictatorships and rigidly authoritative governments can't withstand that full sharing of information for long, he asserted. According to Lee, as many as 3 billion people, half the world's population, have never made a phone call. The Hatfield talk is sponsored by the Robert S. Hatfield Fund for Economic Education, established in 1980 by the Continental Group Foundation. Robert Hatfield, the program's benefactor, was in attendance at the talk, as was President Hunter Rawlings, who introduced Lee. Xerox Corp. During his visit, Lee also spoke and met with students in Strategic Management, an undergraduate course in the Department of Agricultural, Resource and Managerial Economics taught by Associate Professor Bruce Anderson, and International Competitive Strategy, a course in the Johnson Graduate School of Management taught by lecturer Jan Katz.