John Kenneth Galbraith…

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… has died, at the ripe old age of 97.

He was the person who first awakened my interest in economics. I read The Affluent Society as a teenager and drew from it the idea that economics might actually be an interesting and relevant subject. (Later acquaintanceship with professional economists cured me of that illusion.) He had a wonderful, elegant, laconic style — he wrote the way Macaulay would have written if he had been tall (JKG was 6’8″ and drew an innate sense of superiority from the fact that he always found himself looking down on people — even the President of the US whom he served as Ambassador to India.) My guess is that most professional economists loathed him. I met him once — when he was a Visiting Professor in Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity. I never go to Ireland without thinking of his phrase “private affluence, public squalor”. Mixed obits in the NYT, the Guardian and The Times.

Quote of the day

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“It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith.”

U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Atlantic Works vs. Brady, 1882.

I love the sentence about the “class of speculative schemers”.

Yochai Benkler’s book…

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… 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.

Shrook

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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

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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…

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… 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…

Is the pace of change really such a shock?

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Lovely rant by Tom Coates. Sample:

My sense of these media organisations that use this argument of incredibly rapid technology change is that they’re screaming that they’re being pursued by a snail and yet they cannot get away! ‘The snail! The snail!’, they cry. ‘How can we possibly escape!?

The problem being that the snail’s been moving closer for the last twenty years one way or another and they just weren’t paying attention. Because if we’re honest, if you don’t want or need to be first and you don’t need to own the platform, it can’t be hard to see roughly where this environment is going. Media will be, must be, transportable in bits and delivered to TV screens and various other players. And there will be enormous archives available that need to be explorable and searchable. And people will create content online and distribute it between themselves and find new ways to express themselves. Changes in the mechanics of those distributions and explorations will happen all the time, but really the major swift is not such a surprise, surely? I mean, how can it be!? Most of it has been happening in an unevenly distributed way for years anyway. And it’s not like it’s enormously hard to see what you’ve got to do to prepare for this – find a way to digitise the content, get as much information as possible about the content, work out how to throw it around the world, look for business models and watch the bubble-up communities for ideas. That’s it. Come on, guys! There’s hard work to be done, but it’s not in observing the trends or trying to work out what to do, it’s in just getting on with the work of sorting out rights and data and digitisation and keeping in touch with ideas from the ground. This should be the minimum a media organisation should do, not some terrifying new world of fear!

I think this is the most important thing that these organisations need to recognise now – not that change is dramatic and scary and that they have to suddenly pull themselves together to confront a new threat, but that they’ve been simply ignoring the world around them for decades. We don’t need people standing up and panicking and shouting the bloody obvious. We need people to watch the industries that could have an impact upon them, take them seriously, don’t freak out and observe what’s moving in their direction and then just do the basic work to be ready for it. The only way that snails catch you up is if you’re too self-absorbed to see them coming.

Quote of the day

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You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve Jobs, giving the Commencement Address at Stanford last June. It’s a wonderful speech, which shows Jobs at his entrancing best.

Thanks to Ian Yorston for the link.