In 1995 in The Road Ahead, Bill Gates used the term friction-free capitalism to describe how the Internet was helping create Adam Smith's ideal marketplace.
Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
What would count as true or false
True if the text of The Road Ahead (first edition 1995, or a 1995/1996 edition) uses the phrase 'friction-free capitalism' to describe how the Internet or information highway would create or move toward Adam Smith's ideal marketplace. Mostly true if the term and the Adam Smith idea both appear but a minor detail differs, e.g. the passage appears only in the 1996 revised edition, or Adam Smith is evoked as 'the ideal market' without being named. Mixed if the term appears but is not linked to the ideal-marketplace idea, or the reverse. Mostly false if the book discusses frictionless markets but never uses the term. False if the book contains neither the term nor the idea.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 'Friction-Free' Economy Rhetoric Holds a Time Bomb Los Angeles Times · 11 January 1996
“Bill Gates’ new book, “The Road Ahead,” features a chapter titled “Friction-Free Capitalism.””
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E2 'Friction-Free' Economy Rhetoric Holds a Time Bomb Los Angeles Times · 11 January 1996
“Gates says it can “bring to realization Adam Smith’s ideal market, at last.””
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E3 Fictions and frictions: Promises, transaction costs and the innovation of network technologies PubMed Central (academic journal article) · 18 March 2019
“For instance, in 1995 Microsoft CEO Bill Gates wrote that the internet would allow a ‘friction-free capitalism’:”
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E4 Fictions and frictions: Promises, transaction costs and the innovation of network technologies PubMed Central (academic journal article) · 18 March 2019
“To date we haven’t achieved Smith’s ideal because would-be buyers and would-be sellers hardly ever have complete information”
Reasoning
A Los Angeles Times column from January 1996 calls The Road Ahead Gates' "new book" and says it has a chapter titled "Friction-Free Capitalism" (E1). The same column quotes Gates saying this can "bring to realization Adam Smith's ideal market, at last" (E2). A 2019 academic article says that in 1995 Gates wrote that the internet would allow "friction-free capitalism" (E3) and quotes his discussion of Smith's ideal (E4). Because the column appeared so soon after publication, this points to the first edition: the book used the term and tied it to Adam Smith's ideal marketplace, which meets the criteria for true.
Cite this claim
Bill Gates, “In 1995 in The Road Ahead, Bill Gates used the term friction-free capitalism to describe how the Internet was helping create Adam Smith's ideal marketplace.” (said 1999). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_0d68333ad1d8, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_0d68333ad1d8
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
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