'NYT' Finds 'Salvation' in Pay Wall?

So suggests well-known writer and bloggingheads.tv chief Robert Wright in a new online-only commentary at the Times' site. His plan has the NYT using, among other things, Amazon or iTunes payment setups already in place. Excerpt:

[Clay] Shirky’s case against micropayments rests largely on the fact that they demand “mental transaction costs” — that is, “the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price.”

Now, if this were by itself a killer objection, then human history would feature no commerce whatsoever, since all transactions initially require this energy. But Shirky backs up his argument with evidence: micropayments have never worked.

Well, that’s true. Then again, no one has ever come up with a micropayment system so simple that the “mental transaction cost” was the sole energy drain.