… is out! It’s entitled The Wealth of Networks and is the publishing event of the year as far as I’m concerned because he’s the scholar best-placed and best-equipped to put the network revolution into context. The title — a nod to Adam Smith — indicates the scale of his ambitions. It’s available as a free download under a Creative Commons licence from here here and for purchase from Amazon.co.uk. I’ve both downloaded and ordered, not just because I want to support the author, but also because, in the end, it’s really useful to have a printed copy — especially one that is destined to become as well-thumbed as this.
Daily Archives: April 30, 2006
Shrook
As an experiment I’ve switched from using NetNewsWire as my RSS reader to Shrook.
First impressions: it’s slick, quick and nicely designed. It also has a neat synchronisation feature which enables you to keep details of your feed subscriptions on a central server and then sync from other computers. Useful if you use more than one machine to read stuff.
The economics of cultural change
One of the most interesting Blogs on the Web is the Becker-Posner Blog, in which two of the smartest intellectuals in the US argue in public about important issues. Gary Becker is a Nobel laureate in economics; Richard Posner is a polymathic judge who has written provocatively (and intelligently) about a wide range of subjects.
Recently, the two have been debating the question of why French society is proving so resistant to measures needed to make it economically successful. Posner argued that there are two major reasons, habit and coordination costs, why cultures, including those of nations and companies, often change very slowly.
In his response, Becker argued that “major economic and technological changes frequently trump culture in the sense that they induce enormous changes not only in behavior but also in beliefs” — and then used my homeland to illustrate the point:
Ireland is an excellent example since not long ago Irish family patterns were the object of study by demographers only because they were so different. These patterns involved late ages at marriage, high birth rates, no divorce, and married women who spent their time mainly caring for children and their husbands. Enshrined in the Irish Constitution of the 1930’s is the hope that married women would not work but instead they would be home taking care of their families.
All aspects of Irish family behavior changed radically during the past two decades: the typical family now has only about two children, divorce was legalized and is growing rapidly despite the Catholic Church’s opposition, and the labor force participation of married women is becoming like that in other parts of Western Europe. The rapid economic growth Ireland experienced during the past couple of decades had a revolutionary impact on the incentives of parents to have many children, on attitudes about whether married women should work, and on whether married couples were obligated to remain together throughout their lives. What is fascinating about the Irish example is that these and other changes in family patterns of behavior occurred while Ireland remained a highly devout nation, with the highest rates of church attendance and other measures of religious belief in the Western world…
The net fought the law – and the law won…
… is the headline on this morning’s Observer column. It’s a sub-editor’s nod to the Grateful Dead, who once recorded the song I fought the law, and the law won.
After a small bout of legal wrangling, Yahoo removed the auctions – once its executives remembered they possessed substantial assets physically located in France.
Spool forward two years, and we find the same company – once a flag carrier for internet freedom – metamorphosing into an obsequious accessory to Chinese political repression. In 2002, Yahoo signed a document entitled ‘Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry’ in which it promised to ‘inspect and monitor the information of domestic and foreign websites’ and ‘refuse access to those websites that disseminate harmful information to protect the internet users of China from the adverse influences of the information’. Since then Microsoft, Cisco and Google have trodden the same grisly path.
Yahoo’s breakneck transformation from libertarian bratpacker to authorised agent of thought control is the salutary tale with which Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu open their book, Who Controls the Internet? (just out from Oxford University Press). Both authors are academic lawyers, and Goldsmith has for years been challenging the myth of internet ungovernability. Now he and his co-author have laid out a persuasive case for this scepticism…