I need a central place to mark down interesting links, recommended restaurants, etc., for our trip to Istanbul in May. This right here is it.
…is Chris Blattman’s, whose first sentence is “You know experimental program evaluation has become a craze when even the Imams want it.” It just gets better from there.
(Via Dani Rodrik, whose blog is near the top of my must-read list.)
Listen, if you read books by Author X, just fucking tell the other person you read books by Author X and be done with it. Don’t turn it into a ridiculous game:
Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony. “Manhattan dating is a highly competitive, ruthlessly selective sport,” Augusten Burroughs, the author of “Running With Scissors” and other vivid memoirs, said. “Generally, if a guy had read a book in the last year, or ever, that was good enough.” The author recalled a date with one Michael, a “robust blond from Germany.” As he walked to meet him outside Dean & DeLuca, “I saw, to my horror, an artfully worn, older-than-me copy of ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett.” That, Burroughs claims, was a deal breaker. “If there existed a more hackneyed, achingly obvious method of telegraphing one’s education, literary standards and general intelligence, I couldn’t imagine it.”
I don’t really have the time to give Eric Alterman’s piece on blogs from the most recent New Yorker the denunciation it so richly deserves, but here are a few quick notes:
Read Alterman’s piece and then read this piece of junk from today’s New York Times, whose précis is as follows:
Asking a Judge to Save the World, or More By DENNIS OVERBYE
Two men are pursuing a lawsuit to stop scientists from using a giant particle accelerator, saying it could create a black hole that might eat up the Earth.
A moment’s googling convinces even the meanest intelligence that these people are cranks. New York Times is the nation’s soi-disant paper of record, and yet it publishes trash like this?
We needn’t even mention the press’s complicity in the Iraq War.
The Alterman piece does a very New Yorker thing: it follows around one person or one organization — in this case the Huffington Post — and takes it as a perfect crystallization of a larger issue. HuffPo has certain editorial problems and reveals the problems in democracy; ergo, blogs as an institution suffer from the same problem. The problem is that the New World Order is not HuffPo v. New York Times; the New World Order is all blogs v. New York Times. When I want to find out about a recent court decision, I don’t consult some generalized blog, no matter how good that blog is; I consult Balkinization. When I want to read about science, I consult science Ph.D.s of various stripes. The fight is between generalized media written by journalism-school graduates with limited understanding of specialized domains, and specialists who may or may not know how to write for a mass audience. The specialists are winning hands down, at least from my perspective.
Alterman’s piece doesn’t grok what democracy is all about. I think my dear friend Adam Rosi-Kessel did the best job summarizing why democracy is important in a piece about the Critical Mass bike movement years ago:
The main difference that CM makes, I believe, is in the time between rides, when otherwise depoliticized cyclists start to take action; to write letters to their representatives and city councillors; to argue with their neighbors, families, and friends; to become increasingly aware of the primary role that the private automobile plays in determining foreign and domestic policy, in separating out rich from poor and black from white, in causing more deaths, injuries, and illnesses than all of the leading ‘public health’ villains.
(Any broader interpretation I attach to Adam’s piece is, of course, my own, and any mistakes are mine rather than his.)
Even if democracy yielded suboptimal results, it would be worthwhile. The point of democracy is not that it gives us superb highways; the point is that it gives people control over their own lives in a way that no other system does. (As it happens, democracy does yield better outcomes.) I’m sure Alterman understands this, but his article doesn’t give me great faith that he’s internalized it.
If the major media have to be defended on the grounds that “they’re less democratic, but their elitism makes them a privileged source of information,” then haven’t they obviously failed? Doesn’t point 1) make that clear? So on what grounds, exactly, do we yearn to rescue major media from their (long-running) demise?
By focusing on “New York Times v. HuffPo,” we’re not only narrowly focusing on one tiny corner of the world’s blogs — we’re also focusing on one tiny corner of the major media. For at least 20 years, we’ve swallowed a steadily increasing amount of News You Can Use, celebrity gossip, and trivialized major stories. Indeed, the Alterman piece is an instance of a larger press problem: reducing a systemic issue to something specific that the reader — more likely the journalist himself — can get his head around. (See, for instance, a broad abuse of power reduced to one specific prison or even one sadistic soldier.)
So zoom out from the Times a little bit. The end of the major media — if it comes — will mean more than just the end of the New York Times. It’ll mean the end of Gannett, the end of CNN, the end of People. Had Alterman focused on a war between all media (including the trashy and disreputable bits) and all blogs, the picture he’d have drawn would have been much different. The Burlington Free Press doesn’t have people on the ground in Iraq; it’s the very rare journalistic organ that can afford that. If we’re comparing HuffPo to the major media, why not compare it to the average newspaper, rather than (arguably) the best one?
Alterman gives short shrift to the history of newspapers. He mentions that early in the history of the Republic, newspapers unashamedly represented the voice of a particular political party. Only in the 20th century did we end up with a quasi-professionalized body of non-specialists called “journalists” with pretensions of objectivity. Seems odd not to linger on this detail. What it says to me is that in the history of the media, the particular mode we’ve been operating in is a flash in the pan. (Likewise: songs printed onto millions of circular media and relentlessly marketed. Another thought for another time.) Had Alterman played up this aspect of The End Of Media, it would instead be The End Of A Blip. Which is hardly news.
That’s about it for now. The whole piece just pissed me off, and today’s bit of New York Times black-hole nonsense just put me over the edge.
What troubles me is that whenever I find a piece in the New Yorker that touches on something I know well, they mess it up. I wonder if I should subscribe to the New York Review of Books or something and see if it does the job any better.
It’s a little nauseating to watch: when Republicans get outed as hypocrites — soliciting gay sex in a bathroom, say, whilst thunderously orating about the sins of The Gays — we liberal types snicker and cheer their downfall. When it happens to one of our own — one of whose “early acts” as governor was to sharpen penalties for johns — we join Martha Nussbaum and intone that “one of the nation’s most gifted and dedicated politicians … was hounded into resignation by a Puritanism and mean-spiritedness that are quintessentially American.” (Quote included in that New Yorker link.) And lots of people have discussed whether prostitution ought to be made legal. I’ve seen the phrase “victimless crime” attached to the Spitzer thing a few times now.
I think I might agree. I don’t really know whether prostitution ought to be legal — seems like there’s a good case that it should be, and lots of reasons why it’s exploitative to women. But the point is: why didn’t we bring this up when Larry Craig solicited gay sex in a bathroom? Why didn’t we declare that the laws were unjust, and the man should be able to do whatever consensual act he wants with whomever he wants? Very few people were saying this; Andrew Sullivan took pity on him. The rest of us were gloating.
Paul Farmer has long been famous, I take it, within the medical community as a brave lifesaver in some of the world’s most destitute places. He’s lived in Haiti for 20-some years, tending to the poor and sick. He used his success against tuberculosis there as a springboard into Russia, where he’s helped prevent the spread of Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis (MDRTB) within and beyond the country’s prison population. He is, to put it succinctly, a saint.
His fame spread to a much broader audience with the publication of Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer. Mountains Beyond Mountains is a hopeful, awe-inspiring, life-changing book. A couple years after reading it, I picked up Farmer’s own Pathologies of Power, expecting great things.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Farmer is a true Christian. Reading a lot of economics — and even a lot of politics inspired by economics — and then reading Farmer, I’m struck by how arid the former sounds in contrast to the latter. A cold calculus might explain to us why we should treat the poor well. Maybe we can justify redistribution to the poor because their utility from one marginal dollar is higher than that for a wealthy person. Or maybe we should aim to stop MDRTB in prisons because those prisoners will go out into the outside world and infect the nonpoor. Farmer cuts through that: we should help the poor because they are poor, and it is our obligation as humans to serve the least fortunate.
Not only that: we should help them because, in most every case, their poverty is a sign that we have failed them. Farmer angrily ticks off case after case, most of them straight from his first-hand experience, where what initially looks like a senseless, random death is seen to be a symptom of a deeper systemic problem. The most haunting of these may be the death of a young Haitian girl named Acephie who contracted HIV from a Haitian soldier. She had sex with him because soldiers are some of the few Haitians with dependable salaries. But what led Acephie into that position of economic dependence to begin with? It didn’t help that the Haitian government, with the blessing of Western development agencies, had evicted Acephie’s family years before to build a dam; the family had to move to higher, poorer ground because of someone’s idea of what was good for them. The road from there leads more or less directly to the AIDS death of a Haitian girl. (James Scott’s Seeing Like A State contains a lot more tragedies in this direction.)
Pathologies of Power is filled with stories like that. It is not a hopeful book; it is very, very bitter. This despite Kidder’s blurb on the cover to the contrary: Kidder recognized the anger, but saw hopefulness that I didn’t.
We won’t permanently end the suffering of the poor, says Farmer, until we fix the causes of that suffering. He labels these causes “structural violence.” Structural violence is what leads poor Haitians to die of preventable disease (“stupid deaths,” to use the Haitians’ phrase) because the World Health Organization deems their treatment “cost-ineffective,” while pharmaceutical companies get wealthy and we argue over the cost-effectiveness of keeping old Americans alive longer. A world devoted to lifting up the least fortunate would stop the stupid deaths first. Drug companies and governments would help the poor even if there were no money to be made from them.
Based purely on its message, I couldn’t recommend this book highly enough: everyone should learn to think like a true Christian in the midst of rapacious capitalism. But stylistically it’s a chore; Farmer is angry, and is lashing out in all directions. His anger leads him to repeat himself 20 or 30 times throughout the book, and to offer very few actual solutions. Which is surprising: the man himself lives to solve the problems of the destitute.
So I think it’s vital to differentiate Farmer The Man from Farmer The Author. That’s also why I’d recommend that you go right out and read Mountains Beyond Mountains instead: it teaches the same powerful lessons, only a lot more concisely and inspiringly.
It’s a funny arc: Bill Clinton was a brilliant man with not much in the way of scruples, who happened to preside over a booming economy and compromised away most every principle. (Quick quiz: what were Bill Clinton’s bedrock principles?) People thought he was fine during office, wished he could keep it in his pants, and prayed for something more courageous than Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. They didn’t get it.
Then came Bush. Eight years of cronyism and disaster upon disaster made Clinton look, in retrospect, like Jesus Christ Himself. (The Onion, days after Bush’s first inauguration: Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over.) I’ve thought for most of the Bush administration that Clinton could run against him and win, term-limit laws notwithstanding.
And now we’re on to Clinton II, and we’re all realizing again what we hated about Clinton: no spine, no principle other than winning an election, nothing for which he or she would draw the line and say “Here and no further.” If Hillary Clinton runs any longer, Bill’s reputation may go back to where it justly lay.
…That is, unless a Republican wins the election, in which case we may be on to Dark Ages Volume 2. But that’s too discouraging to think about, so I won’t.
I would like to declare that I am officially sick of this election.
I don’t care what Geraldine Ferraro said about anything.
A good friend wants to convince me that I should be paying more attention to the thing about Obama’s pastor, because Fox News may very well turn it into something that sinks Obama’s candidacy, à la the Dean Scream.
If that’s so, then fuck this country and fuck its media. Just because something turns out to be important to a campaign doesn’t mean it’s important that I follow it in detail. My understanding of the “Wright issue” suggests that it tells us precisely nothing about what kind of president Obama would be. So yes, I will maintain my haughty distance from the issue and not obsessively read polls about what effect it’s having on Obama’s campaign. I know which candidate I support. Until someone convinces me that Obama is an Angry Black Man, as “proven” by Wright, I will continue to know which candidate I support.
Some decent fraction of the blogs I read will continue to pore over poll numbers that fluctuate with the wind, and attach massive importance to statistical noise.
And still we have well over 200 days of campaigning left. Joy.
John Resig today has a post up about the getBoundingClientRect() method, introduced in IE5, which is now a part of Firefox 3. It solves all kinds of problems, and in particular it sounds like it will make a lot of code that’s already in Resig’s
jQuery unnecessary. Which points out two things:
The standards-making bodies — in particular the W3C — will come along after the major players have figured out their customers’ pain points and have developed their own solutions. In this case it sounds like it won’t really matter by then, because the two most popular browsers will have already implemented their solutions. Maybe W3C ratification would make Safari come along, but I’d think it’d be in Safari’s interests to join in as it is.
If you want code that will work in any browser, you have to do like Resig did and write at least 50 lines of JavaScript. Of those, Resig only needed six lines for browsers that support getBoundingClientRect(); see line 16 et seq. in offset.js.
Thankfully there exists someone in this world — namely Resig — who will do this work for me. If lines are any measure, it takes about 8 times as much effort to write code that works across all browsers as it does to write code that assumes more about its environment. Am I going to invest that effort if I’m writing the code on my own? I guess I have to, if I want my pages to look good outside of IE5 or FF3. But I can be forgiven for being lazy about it, testing in one or two browsers, and moving on.
Note also that those 50 lines of JavaScript relate to one tiny corner of website rendering, namely determining the dimensions of the box in which an element sits. The entirety of jQuery is about 2200 lines.
The point is that it’s one thing to seek out interoperability; it is another to insist on it zealously and monomaniacally.
Does anyone know how we got into a position where a few large institutions (Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s) tell us how reliable a given security is? John Quiggin makes the point that after the subprime collapse, those companies have got to go.
My (undeveloped) instinct would say that “in the long term,” the interest rate should reliably signal the risk of a security; hence the rating agencies would be superfluous. I’m sure there are reasons why that’s wrong, and Quiggin may in fact hint at some of those reasons in his post. If your organization is required to invest only in AAA securities, you’re presumably going to be very cautious; you won’t, for instance, invest in any investment vehicles until they’ve been tested. So any of the exotic derivatives would presumably be ruled out. Maybe one justification for a debt-rating service is that it keeps money flowing into securities that would otherwise be illiquid. It’s not clear that this is a virtue.
I’d just like to know how we ended up here in the first place. Why rely on what Moody’s considers safe? If I’m a rational investor who’s concerned about the safety of my money, why not pay attention to where, say, Calpers or Warren Buffett are investing? Is this too much of an informational burden to expect most investors to bear?
If, on the other hand, I pay attention only to interest rates as a measure of risk, I really want to be looking at the standard deviation of interest rates over a sufficiently long period; the return on something like a blue-chip stock would be less variable than the return on a penny stock, and likewise for a Treasury bond versus a derivative. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect people to pay attention to beta coefficients and whatnot.
So then if boundedly rational agents can’t be expected to process all the data that’s in front of them, someone is going to come in and simplify for them. Whether it’s Consumer Reports or Calpers or whoever, someone is going to publish a simple measure of a security’s risk. What’s not clear to me is why we’d then expect there to be so few risk-measurers. If we just “naturally” ended up with Moody’s and S&P, this would seem to suggest that reputation is a good with massively increasing returns; monopolies would fall right out of the process.
That may well be the case, but it strikes me as odd. Do any other goods have so few guarantors of their reputation? If you’re looking to buy a car, there are limitless places you could check: you can see if it’s a good model on Consumer Reports; you can check its blue-book value; you can check its serial number on the web to see if it’s ever been in any accidents; you can do a quick web check on the vendor to see if other people have labeled him a scam artist; etc. All of that would take you approximately 10 minutes, if you’re a slow typist.
Or consider a restaurant’s reputation. Part of that reputation is backed by the law: you can be reasonably sure that there will be no feces in your food. There’s an argument that lawsuits and capitalism would buy you everything that sanitation departments do: a persistent pattern of soiled food would quickly put a restaurant out of business, and you could sue them if someone you love dies. That seems to make the point more strongly: there’s a web of institutions putting some lower bound on a given restuarant’s reputation. There’s no Standard & Poor’s for restaurants. So why is there an S&P for securities?
Thinking more about interoperability fetishism, a few specific web problems occur to me:
Last I knew, not many browsers supported the font-variant: small-caps CSS property. To use this style interoperably, you’d want to do some CSS detection: if the browser does support that property, use it; otherwise, either use a smaller font size and text-transform: uppercase or just avoid using it altogether. You have to write a lot of nasty browser-detection code to make this work.
HTML 5 will contain client side storage of name-value pairs with more flexibility than cookies. In particular, you can bind a name-value pair to a particular session. But not all browsers support HTML 5, so you’d need to fall back to using cookies if that’s the only available mechanism. To be interoperable, then, will web developers be expected to write two sets of code, one that uses cookies and one that uses the newer interfaces?
The elementFromPoint() DOM method will be “a godsend for drag-and-drop scripts”: “If the user drops an element, get the mouse coordinates and use this method to find out which HTML element is located at these coordinates.” I’m not familiar enough with Ajax to know how this would have been implemented before, but it sounds like there wasn’t anything like this in earlier incarnations of the DOM. Presumably if you wanted to write drag-and-drop code, you had to hack around the browsers’ limitations. Now you won’t have to. So again: should developers keep two separate branches going and use browser detection to figure out which one to run?
Interoperability purists will insist that your code should be able to work even if the browser doesn’t have JavaScript. If you’re a site like Amazon, and you’d lose a lot of money when even 1% of the browser market can’t use your site, I can see wanting to code for this case: you’d want to fall back to server-side code for more or less everything. If you’re a smaller-time developer, though, the marginal benefit from spending another hour on server-side code (another branch in the tree) seems pretty tiny. Apologies, but: I don’t care how my blog looks under Lynx, or how it looks for the two people in the last year who visited my site using Mosaic. Facebook doesn’t care how it looks under text-only browsers (in this case w3m) either:
Now, it’s a whole different story if someone writes a nice set of abstractions for you. My sense is that the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is one such set of abstractions. If it takes me no effort to write code that degrades nicely, then I’ll do it. But if the abstractions are client-side-only, I don’t see how they’ll solve the problem of ancient browsers; in that case, the abstraction would need to fall back to server-side code. Does anyone know whether the Google Web Toolkit generates server-side code as well? If it did, that would be pretty sweet.
I’m getting the sense that there’s an Early Bellow, a Somewhat Later Bellow, and an Older Bellow, each of which is more or less independent of the others (so far as the reader is concerned). Early Bellow may only consist of Dangling Man. I didn’t especially like Dangling Man, though I’ve seen it referred to in other novels of the time as pathbreaking, heralding a new beginning of some sort. To me it just seemed kind of bland: a guy’s trapped back at home while all his buddies are off at the war … and that’s about it. Maybe I should have written a review of it at the time; as it is, most of it has slipped out of my mind, other than the fact that nothing much grabbed me about it.
Somewhat Later Bellow is the era of Augie March and the work under examination here. Augie is a Quintessential American, off trying to discover himself and letting others tell him who he is, until he decides to control his own life and decide his own fate. It is a vast, sweeping book, or tries to be. I just found it tiresome.
Which brings us to Henderson the Rain King. I figured it was from the Augie March era even before I read the copyright date. It has an Augie-like character, though it’s quite a bit tauter than Augie. Our hero heads off into the wilds of Africa to find himself and fill in a gnawing void in his soul; it keeps crying out to him “I want, I want!” Much craziness happens to him in the wild, but that’s not really the point. Nothing very much ever happens to Bellow heroes; any action that does happen to them is purely accidental, and I’m sure Bellow apologizes profusely for it. The real action is in the characters’ own minds. They’re all trying to figure out who they are, what they want, what they think, or what the world around them is all about. They’re confused, stuck in the world as it’s given to them, and lost.
Gene Henderson comes from a wealthy family and may have emptied large portions of his inheritance on travel, girls, food … whatever. He’s lived in Paris and London, probably because his spirit continued to cry “I want, I want!” and he thought he could give it what it wanted in Europe. By the time we run into him, he’s in his sixties and desperate to know what he wants before he dies. He’s gone through a few wives, children who hardly play any role in the story (or, we imagine, in his life), and a few million dollars.
Henderson is a fascinating, repulsive character. He’s continually surging forth into a monologue about his internal travails; one African after another who can’t understand a word he’s saying just keeps telling him “Yes, suh.” He finally meets a tribal king who can corral all that internal violence into something productive; their friendship is the center of the whole story, and Bellow delivers it beautifully. It would be very easy to turn this into some schlock about Wise Africans or Man Finding Himself or whatnot, but that would be impossible in a Bellow novel: protagonists go wherever they may but can’t escape their own characters. They never really Find Themselves; quite often they’re Self-Consciously Trying To Find Themselves, and doing a more or less good job of it.
Older Bellow dispenses with most of the outer garb of Early Bellow: why bother sending your guy off into Africa or the deserts of the Western United States if all the action is inside his own head? Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet don’t (if memory serves) leave the immediate vicinity of the protagonists’ homes. They’re books about nebbishes, and at times they’re almost a parody of Allan Bloom (one of Bellow’s closest friends): Moses Herzog and Artur Sammler have lived lives of horror, and their posture toward the world is reflective cowering.
Oddly enough, I think Older Bellow is more readable; all the world traveling was kind of needless, as Bellow came to realize. You will take Herzog and Sammler from me when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
I’ve put in a request at the library for Ravelstein (see The Bellow-Parcells letters from The Morning News), which is one of Bellow’s last novels if not his last. As everyone knows by now, it is a roman à clef about Allan Bloom, and apparently reveals that the old conservative curmudgeon was a gay man who died of AIDS. More to the point for our immediate purposes, I imagine that it’s more of the intellectual exploration which Older Bellow does so well. I hope that I can recover some of my love for the man’s works by seeing what he became, rather than where he started.
The subject of the above-named paper is to address the claim that “If someone knew with certainty that a house would be worth $400,000 five years from now, it would already be worth that much (minus some annual rate of interest).” It’s a cool-sounding paper, and addresses a point that came up in a discussion recently. I’d like to read it. I have a nearly unreadable copy of it; I wonder if anyone has a cleaner edition.
The cite is
Samuelson, Paul A., “Proof That Properly Anticipated Prices Fluctuate Randomly” , Industrial Management Review, 6:2 (1965:Spring) p.41
It looks like it may be in ProQuest, but I don’t have access to that.
I’d appreciate any help y’all could send my way.
I think I have become supersaturated with mathematical economics, at least for the moment. I am going to switch to Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King this evening.
Thank you for your attention in this matter.
(Update: Due to excellence on the part of friends who shall remain anonymous, that paper is now mine.)
Really the goal is to find necessary and sufficient conditions under which market allocation is optimal, in some interesting sense of “optimal.” Apparently this paper relaxes the Walrasian assumption of an auctioneer. I saw it cited in Bowles’s Microeconomics; it looked interesting. Alas: not being a member of a university library, I have no access to it on my own.
Looks like that journal may be in ScienceDirect?
P.S.: Ah yes.
Zees is what we call zee extortion?
I’d buy the following if they weren’t so expensive. Why must academic books be so pricey? I wonder if academic publishers think much about price elasticity. Maybe they do, and that’s just the point: the students who are their main customers have no choice whether to buy them.
Definition of ‘natural flavor’, according to the FDA:
(3) The term natural flavor or natural flavoring means the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional. Natural flavors include the natural essence or extractives obtained from plants listed in §§182.10, 182.20, 182.40, and 182.50 and part 184 of this chapter, and the substances listed in §172.510 of this chapter.
Did you catch that? Good. Those are the same oleoresins, essences or extractives, protein hydrolysates, distillates, or products of heating, roasting or enzymolysis that grandma used to make.
Probably a good rule of thumb to capture this: if it actually contains lemon juice, its ingredient panel will say it contains lemon juice. Likewise for garlic powder or most anything else that you would recognize as food. ‘Natural flavor’ is a label that seems to indicate food-company embarrassment more than anything else.
A quick note, apropos of some changes in IE 8 (via Ajaxian): a lot of people who design websites, including an earlier version of myself, have made a fetish of interoperability and standards-compliance. I’ll grant you that those are valuable goals, but it’s almost a tautology: the more standards-compliant you are, the less innovative you are. Standards-compliance means, among other things, waiting for a standard to appear. In the meantime, you need to use whatever standard technologies are available. E.g., go back to the era of CSS1. When that was the only tool available, standards-compliant sites didn’t look that good. Using Flash was sensible.
Nowadays, CSS is better but still not great. There’s no standard way to embed a video container on a web page so that everyone can view it, so of course people use Flash for this. HTML 5, I’m told, will add a video tag to help with this, but that’s just the point: the standard to solve a problem came along after innovators — YouTube in this case — had solved it in their own ways. What would YouTube have done if it had tried to be standards-compliant from the start? It probably would have done exactly what everyone else did before YouTube, namely include a link to an AVI file or something. YouTube made a strong innovation that helped it spread far past the bounds that any other video-sharing service previously had reached, precisely because it uses a little bit of code to embed a Flash container in any website that cares to use it. It had to make its own standard in order to innovate.
That first link above suggests that Microsoft is proposing some UI innovations for IE 8. A quick glance says that it has observed some patterns in the way people use the web (copying and pasting a link, blogging about a link, etc.), and has developed some code to make that pattern more efficient. There may be a way to implement this pattern in JavaScript and CSS, or there may not be. We shouldn’t have to wait for a standard to get a solution to this problem.
Besides which, “waiting for a standard” doesn’t encapsulate the way I understand the process works. The way I envision it is that YouTube, blip.tv and whoever else all try out their own ways of embedding video in a platform-independent way. Then a lot of them get a seat at the standards-making table and decide how browsers should implement something like the “video” tag. That is, the standard should reflect the best technologies that anyone has come up with. If the standard were invented in the abstract — that is, before anyone has tried to solve the problem on his own — it’s likely not to match up with what people actually need. It’s likely to be a solution in search of a problem — architecture astronauts, in other words.
In short: the best standards, it seems to me, will necessarily come after a long period of sussing out a problem. And that experimentation will not fit comfortably within existing standards (e.g., YouTube did not fit comfortably in a world comprising only CSS, HTML, and JavaScript); if it did, we wouldn’t need to develop new standards.
So let’s not make a fetish of interoperability. We have problems to solve first.
I don’t know if it’s really intentional, but Shapiro and Varian make a funny throughout Information Rules. If you’re a company selling an information product, say Shapiro and Varian, you should pay attention to three big aspects of information goods:
To some extent these all exist in non-information goods. Airlines guess how much you’re willing to pay based on whether you buy at the last minute; grocery stores know whether you’re price-conscious if you clip coupons. The airlines also furnish a good example of lock-in: they joyously lock themselves into massive many-years-long contracts with, say, Boeing, in order to cut down on the number of brands that their employees have to learn how to repair. As for network externalities, fashion goods are probably a decent example (each pair of Nike shoes almost certainly grows more valuable the more people own them), as is any product where standardization is important: the more of us who use standard-size doors and windows in our houses, the more the companies that make them can exploit economies of scale and produce them more cheaply.
So these economic quirks of information goods have been around for a long time, even if they play a much larger role on the Internet. Shapiro and Varian’s point is that the basic economic logic controlling information goods hasn’t changed much in a long time; the Internet isn’t the end of economics. They apply the three bullets above to a large number of examples, and very specifically lay out how businessmen can exploit these principles to make more money.
Where it gets funny is that one businessman’s loss is another’s gain. Shapiro and Varian tell one group of businessmen how to lock customers into their products, then tell another group how to avoid lock-in, how to extract contractual concessions in exchange for lock-in, etc. They’re not exactly talking out of both sides of their mouth; it’s more like they’re addressing one side of the room, then the other, then back and forth and back and forth until their necks snap.
Two minor critiques:
It is entirely successful in its aims, though: examine the particular opportunities in the information economy, then very specifically lay out what makes businesses survive or die in that environment.
This is the sort of trivia that I am unendingly happy to learn: JFK Street in Cambridge was named that way to get back at the Kennedy School of Government. Rodrik’s post included below.
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