Brad DeLong

Neighborhoods in Kansas City, MO That Have and Have Not Met Their Google Fiber Target Sign-Up Percenrages...

David Warsh Corrects Gordon Krovitz and Tyler Cowen Brian Carnell on the Record as to the Origins of the Internet

The Founding Principle of the Sixth International: Private where private belongs, public where it is needed, and circumstances alter cases.

David Warsh patiently explains how thick description and careful analysis trump ideology as tools for understanding how things really are:

Economic Principals » Blog Archive » Who /Really/ Invented the Internet?: “It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet.” That was former Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz…. In fact, he wrote, it was Xerox Corp. that came up with the idea of linking different computer networks together. Crovitz buttressed his opinion with a quotation from economist Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University Brian Carnell:

The Internet… reaffirms the basic free market critique of big government. Here for thirty years the government has an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished…. In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the decade.”

That brought a strong letter of dissent from Vinton Cerf and Stephen Wolff, each of whom made key contributions, while working for the US Defense Department in the early 1970s, to the architecture of the astonishing new technology….

Only a Government Would Have Created the Internet

Duncan Black:

Eschaton: I think the aspect of the "government invented the internet" which isn't emphasized enough is that it isn't just some random fluke that it was born out of various public and publicly financed entities. A private company would not have created it. Before the internet (or www, depending on precisely what we're talking about) we had various pre-internets, which were all cool enough in their own way and offered various applications, information, and services to people. In some ways the were superior to the internet of old, but they weren't the "informtaion superhighway" which we could all just hook into any way we wanted. It wasn't so much the technology, though it was that too, it was the idea, and it isn't an idea a for-profit company would have pursued in nearly the same way.

In some ways we're seeing the return to the pre-internet version, though the actual internet still exists. Facebook polices content, and people expect them to for reasons I can't fathom…

No Further Updates to Email Client Sparrow...

This seems pretty evil to me:

Sparrow — Get mail done: We're excited to announce that Sparrow has been acquired by Google! We care a lot about how people communicate, and we did our best to provide you with the most intuitive and pleasurable mailing experience. Now we're joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision — one that we think we can better achieve with Google.

We’d like to extend a special thanks to all of our users who have supported us, advised us, given us priceless feedback and allowed us to build a better mail application. While we’ll be working on new things at Google, we will continue to make Sparrow available and provide support for our users.

We had an amazing ride and can't thank you enough.

Full speed ahead!

Dom Leca, CEO Sparrow

: http://sprw.me/

News from Google Fiber

Growthology: News from Google Fiber - Kansas City:

Eschaton: Netflixed

Duncan Black: Netflixed:

I don't think this piece on Netflix makes clear the real point: absent a different legal regime, streaming video might be the future of how people watch rental videos generally, but it's pretty obvious that there is no successful business model for subscription streaming that isn't essentially owned by the content makers. Well, unless net neutrality goes away and the cable cos get to throw their monopoly weight around in this area.

Streaming might kill Netflix DVD-by-mail eventually, but Netflix won't fix that problem with streaming. They'll never make money there.

Agglomeration Economies and Industrial Policies

Paul Krugman:

Motor City Stories: Brian Palmer has a nice summary of the reasons behind the concentration of car companies in Michigan… historical accident perpetuated by agglomeration economies. What he doesn’t say is that there is a close relationship between such stories and the case for the auto bailout. Agglomeration economies exist because… the network of suppliers, the skills, the interchange of knowledge supported by a geographical industry concentration in turn gives firms in that industry concentration an advantage…. Now, the existence of important agglomeration economies immediately implies that there are social consequences to the success or failure of an individual firm that aren’t captured by the profit and loss statement of that firm alone. Let General Motors fail, and the resulting collapse of its suppliers will hurt other firms too, possibly driving them out of business too. You don’t want to overuse this sort of argument…. But it was surely a major consideration for the auto bailout — and a reason why hard-line opposition to any such action was bad economics.

Tobias Buckell: B&N teams up with MSFT

Tobias Buckell

B&N teams up with MSFT: If you’d told me that B&N and MSFT had teamed up back in 2002 I would have thought ‘how Orwellian,’ and yet in this picture, they’re both the underdogs. But this will give Microsoft things to offer as it tries to come out with a tablet soon. And while I’m not the world’s biggest Microsoft fan, I do love competition…

Academics to the Barricades!: Long Past Time to Stop Publishing in High-Cost Journals...

Henry Farrell writes:

Harvard Library pushes open access: This looks like a bombshell announcement to me (I’m not aware of the internal politics behind the announcement, but I’m presuming that Robert Darnton’s fingerprints are all over it). Discuss.

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library.… [M]ajor periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained.… It is untenable for contracts with at least two major providers to continue on the basis identical with past agreements. Costs are now prohibitive…. [P]lease consider the following options open to faculty and students (F) and the Library (L), state other options you think viable, and communicate your views: Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies (F). Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access (F). If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning (F).

Some of this may be hardball bargaining, with the two unnamed providers (one of which, I presume, has a name starting with E[lsevier-North Holland]). But not very much – to state the problem so bluntly, and to encourage faculty to stop publishing in, and resign from the boards of non-open access journals sounds more like pushing for system-change than for a better deal within the current system. This may be the beginning of the end.

It ought to be not just the beginning of the end, but the end itself.

Gary Reback (2002): Patently Absurd http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html Courtesy of Tim Berners Lee

Sign of the Yuppie Apocalypse?

Or is Whole Foods simply exploring to see if there is any price at all that makes its target demographic go "Whoa!!"?

eBooks and Amazon: Charlie Stross Fears Doom at the Hands of Cold-Blooded Slow-Thinking Publishers

Charlie's Diary:

What Amazon's ebook strategy means: By Charlie Stross It seems to me that a lot of folks in the previous discussion don't really understand quite what makes Amazon so interesting—and threatening, for that matter—to the publishing industry. So I'm going to take a stab at explaining…. I'd like to introduce three keywords that need defining before you can understand Amazon:

Disintermediation…. Monopoly…. Monopsony.

Charles Stross: Thinking About the Internet

Charles Stross

The inadmissible assumptions: Underlying all debate on the future of the internet are a constellation of unspoken assumptions. These include:

a) Advertising is socially neutral or good,
b) Internet content provision on the internet is therefore best funded by selling eyeballs to advertisers,
c) Most people just want to consume content the way they used to consume TV or movies, and it's socially acceptable to orient the internet around this model (call it the broadcasting fallacy),
d) We can be trusted; it's Big Government/Big Corporations/Foreign Governments/Weird Religious Nutters/Those crazy guys with the opposite politics to me who can't be trusted.

May I Say That Posting Nutrution Information on Processed Food Products Is Exactly What the Government Ought to Be Requiring Merchants to Do?

Nancy-Ann Min DeParle is on the wrong side here:

Gardiner Harris: White House and F.D.A. at Odds on Regulatory Issues: Nancy-Ann DeParle, the whip-smart and sometimes caustic White House deputy chief of staff, picked up The Wall Street Journal one summer day in 2010 and got an unwelcome shock. The Food and Drug Administration was proposing as part of the new health care law to require that movie theaters post calorie counts for popcorn — and this was the first she had heard of it.

In the F.D.A.’s view, the law called for moviegoers to know that many a buttery bucket of popcorn had more calories than two Big Macs, but Ms. DeParle, President Obama’s chief health adviser, thought the requirement was unnecessary and would probably be lampooned on Fox News as an especially silly example of the government intrusions that conservatives often mocked as the nanny state…

A more-informed consumer is a better consumer. That is not rocket science.

David Dayen comments:

The Administration’s Muzzling of the FDA: [T]here’s plenty more…. The FDA wanted to regulate sunscreen by banning use of the name for ineffective products. The White House just wanted them listed as ineffective. The FDA wanted over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill. The White House wanted sales restricted behind the counter. And the White House ends up winning all these fights. They see the FDA as “hopelessly naïve” do-gooders who don’t understand the implications of their actions. This of course reflects on them as the hopelessly naïve ones, thinking that Republicans will somehow stop their attacks if they never use the power vested in them by the Constitution. The obsession with message and image has real consequences for policy.

The article explains how the Bush Administration first tampered with the FDA’s independence, and that the White House under Obama has really done the same thing, if for different reasons. The Bush Administration just didn’t want the regulations. The Obama Administration just didn’t want the risk associated with the regulations. But the impact is exactly the same; it doesn’t matter what’s in the heart of those stopping the regulations. “Employees here waited eight long years for deliverance that didn’t come,” said one top FDA official.

Reading over this report, you get the impression that the biggest consumers of Glenn Beck in the 2009-2010 period were White House staffers. And policies were set so as to not rouse him…. This is about big money and lobbying, sure, but also a philosophy that comes from Cass Sunstein, a light-touch “nudge” theory of regulation that clashes with the FDA’s main mission to protect the public. The article closes with this from Susan Wood. I will also:

Susan Wood, a former head of the office of women’s health at the F.D.A., had resigned in 2005 to protest the Bush administration’s repeated refusal to make emergency contraceptives available without a prescription. In 2009, the White House invited Dr. Wood to attend a ceremony during which Mr. Obama signed a presidential memorandum pledging to restore scientific integrity to government decision-making and to listen to scientists “even when it’s inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient.” Dr. Wood said that she feels Mr. Obama broke that promise and fears future administrations will overrule the F.D.A. in other such controversial areas.

Quotation of the Day: April 3, 2012

"Here’s the power of the machine: that having broken arithmetic down into tiny idiot steps, it can then execute those steps at inhuman speed, forever. Or until a vacuum tube blows."

--Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

Econ 1: Spring 2012: UC Berkeley: Essay on "Free to Choose"

For your essay on Milton and Rose Director Friedmans' Free to Choose:

Due at the first section meeting after the April 11, 2012 lecture

Write an essay of between 700 and 1000 words on one of the following three topics:

1. Why is it really a very, very important thing for the Friedmans' argument that they convince peope that the Great Depression was the result of the failure of a government agency--the Federal Reserve--and not the failure of the market system?

2. What do the Friedmans think are the biggest things wrong with the U.S.'s welfare and social insurance systems as they stood in 1980? Do you think they would find the same to be the system's most important flaws today? Why or why not?

3. Explain why the Friedmans think that the Food and Drug Administration is unnecessary. The Chinese government executed the head of its counterpart Food and Drug Administration for failing to do his job: for being corrupt and allowing substances dangerous to health and life to enter the domestic and export food value chains. Does this change your view of the Friedmans' argument about the FDA? Why or why not?

Roger Altman: The U.S. Needs a More Progressive Income Tax System and More Public Investment in Education

By coincidence, exactly what I told my Econ 1 students yesterday:

No more inaction on income inequalitym: Two solutions stand above the rest. The US needs a more progressive tax system and one that raises more revenue. The latest data reveal that the top 1 per cent of earners got 93 per cent of all increases in after-tax personal income in 2010. That reflects, among other things, low effective tax rates for much of this group, which are largely explained by the high percentage of their income that consists of capital gains and dividends…. In the longer term, it is imperative to raise education levels. This means better secondary-school completion rates, which lead to increased university attendance. And it also means higher university completion rates, with the greater lifetime earnings that follow. In America, wide-ranging public school reforms are necessary to achieve the first goal, including better methods for teacher training, evaluation and compensation, improved curriculums and upon graduation, as a minimum, assured admission to community colleges. Fortunately, this reform movement is finally showing some signs of life. We need a big initiative to make university affordable and inclusive.

These steps are not impossible. Far from it. They are readily attainable with the right leadership. Mr Obama’s welcome focus on the problem should now be coupled with genuine solutions.

Agglomeration Economies and Industrial Policies

Paul Krugman:

Motor City Stories: Brian Palmer has a nice summary of the reasons behind the concentration of car companies in Michigan… historical accident perpetuated by agglomeration economies. What he doesn’t say is that there is a close relationship between such stories and the case for the auto bailout. Agglomeration economies exist because… the network of suppliers, the skills, the interchange of knowledge supported by a geographical industry concentration in turn gives firms in that industry concentration an advantage…. Now, the existence of important agglomeration economies immediately implies that there are social consequences to the success or failure of an individual firm that aren’t captured by the profit and loss statement of that firm alone. Let General Motors fail, and the resulting collapse of its suppliers will hurt other firms too, possibly driving them out of business too. You don’t want to overuse this sort of argument…. But it was surely a major consideration for the auto bailout — and a reason why hard-line opposition to any such action was bad economics.

Brian Palmer:

Why are all the big American car companies based in Michigan?: Detroit and its environs had a lot to offer the nascent auto industry around the turn of the 20th century. Iron ore… timber… [r]ail and water routes…. And Detroit already hosted heavy industry like machine shops and stove works…. Detroit’s eventual dominance probably had more to do with a couple of historical accidents than any geographic advantage. First, innovators like Henry Ford and Ransom Olds happened to live in Michigan. Second, automotive executives in early-20th-century Detroit behaved a lot like Silicon Valley executives today: They regularly switched companies and launched spinoffs and startups. This culture of cross-pollination spread innovative manufacturing and design ideas among the Detroit manufacturers. Distant competitors couldn’t keep up with Motown’s research and development….

[N]one of the 69 companies that entered the auto industry (PDF) between 1895 and 1900 was located in Detroit. Olds Motor Works became the city’s first major carmaker when it relocated from Lansing in 1900. Ransom Olds then made a decision that would shape the course of the industry—rather than creating hundreds of small components in-house for his Curved Dash Runabout, he subcontracted much of the work…. The people who built the car’s parts eventually learned so much about automotive manufacturing that they went on to launch their own brands….

The number of U.S. carmakers peaked at 272 in 1909, including major manufacturers in New England and Ohio. During the 1910s, however, the Detroit brands pulled away. In 1915, 13 out of the country’s 15 most popular car brands were in Detroit. Motor City executives, particularly Ford, invested heavily in research and development, distancing their products from the out-of-towners…

Marginal Products and Earnings in Historical Perspective...

In 1183 A.D., Reynaud de Chatillon--Prince of Antioch, Castellan of Kerak in Moab, Lord of Oultrejourdain, one of the leading nobles of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, tall, strong, handsome, wielding his two-handed sword In Nomine Domine, and suffering from severe impulse-control problems--had much, much higher earnings than I would have had had I been back in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1183.

Today, by contrast, I sit here outdoors in the warm Berkeley winter sun with a Treasury-Department Family Economic Income concept eight times the U.S. median, and were Reynaud de Chatillon to be here now he would be working the loading dock at Target at near-minimum wage and on Thorazine, for the skills that were his comparative advantage are to typically highly rewarded today--if he were not in Folsom Prison.

And perhaps in future centuries the wheel will turn again:

Ryan Avent:

Technology: Cognitive inequality: LAST week, I participated in a panel discussion on open questions in economics with professor and economics blogger extraordinaire Karl Smith. We got to talking about inequality, and I ran through a few of the bog standard interpretations of rising income gaps: mismatches between the supply of and demand for skills, superstar effects at the very top, and improved rent-seeking in the financial sector. Mr Smith offered something dramatically different, some of which he gets at in this post:

I want to make the point that this consistent with my long thesis that we are returning to an environment where productivity gains do not accrue to unskilled labor because they are imbedded in the brains of the innovators. A factory is really big and hard to keep secret. Computer code less so. When you simply write down the process you want or draw the object you want and the computer translates it for you the seep down [keeping the relative income distribution from blowing apart] will grind to [a] complete halt….

I want to stop there and use this thought to begin to tie a few threads together. Politicians, and many economists, are increasingly focused on the importance of global supply chains…. [W]hat most people seem to gloss over is the fact that the most important parts of modern supply chains are embedded in the heads of innovators and… in the space… in which discussions about innovation take place…. [T]he most important parts of the Apple supply chain are Steve Jobs' brain and the community of engineers tasked with turning Jobs' musings into actual, revolutionary products.

This has significant implications…. Someone with an outstanding analytical framework and a talent for manipulating information has probably (or at least potentially) enjoyed huge productivity and consumption gains from the internet and related technologies. Others have gotten some benefits from the internet, but it's far from clear that those benefits are outweighed by, say, the impact of increased outsourcing on the wage they can command….

[I]s this an iron rule of innovation in information technology—that the cheaper information becomes and the easier it becomes to manipulate it the greater will be the gap, productive and otherwise, between the informationally capable and the rest?

That's certainly possible….

I'm not sure we should be confident that continued innovation won't ultimately augment cognition generally, and perhaps in relatively surprising ways. Maybe as the internal aspect of cognition shrinks relative to the external, technological aspect, the differences in internal characteristics across the population will cease to matter very much. The more I rely on the same cloud brain that's available to anyone else, the less the strengths or weaknesses of my meat brain may matter…

But it probably will not turn again back in the direction of Raynaud de Chatillon.

Information Technology Cognitive Multipliers

Kevin Drum:

The Internet is a Major Driver of the Growth of Cognitive Inequality: Apropos of yesterday's post about using Google to convert joules to electron volts, a friend of mine emailed this morning to say that Wolfram Alpha would be an even better choice. It's one of his favorite time wasters, he said.

Well. I remember using Alpha back when it first came out, and then giving up because it didn't seem to live up to its hype. But I haven't used it in quite a while, so I headed over to try it out. But what to ask? Hmmm. How about asking it to check the price of a gallon of milk?1 So I did. Answer: $20 million gal, whatever that means, which converts to $4.62 billion cubic inches, whatever that means. If you ask for the price of a quart of milk, it tells you the milk production budget for the Quart region of Italy. Thanks, Wolfram Alpha!

But does Google do any better? Sort of. I typed in the same question, and one hit was from an elementary school class project telling me that a gallon of milk costs $2.99 in Bakersfield, along with conversions of that amount into pounds, lira, and punts. Which suggests this data might be a wee bit out of date.

Another hit was from Yahoo Answers, which informed me that the price of milk was "OUTRAGEOUSLY TOO HIGH," and then provided a range of prices from around the country. The "Best Answer," garnering two votes, was $3.50. That was in 2008. Ask.com provided answers for 1917, 1950, and 2007.

In a way, this is the internet in a nutshell. One site provides a very precise answer that's spectacularly wrong. Another site provides a fantastic wealth of answers, all of which are sort of wrong in various different ways. But if you're smart enough to reformulate your search as "usda milk price retail," as I eventually did, you'll get this extremely authoritative-looking document from the USDA that provides average retail whole milk prices in 30 different U.S. cities for January 2012. The average is $3.69 per gallon. Other reports are available for reduced fat milk, organic whole milk, and organic reduced fat milk.

Moral of the story: the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. If you don't know how to use it, or don't have the background to ask the right questions, you'll end up with a head full of nonsense. But if you do know how to use it, it's an endless wealth of information. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Caveat emptor...

Daring Fireball: Google Makes the Old 1990s Mistake

John Gruber:

Daring Fireball: MG Siegler on Google’s promotion of Google Plus pages in web search results:

I’m going to go ahead and make a prediction: this does not end well for Google. I’m not saying Google falls as a result of this mistake — that would be foolish, they’re too big to fail anytime soon — but I do think that over an extended period of time, whether users consciously realize it or not, they’ll start looking elsewhere for their information needs because Google has strayed from their foundation.

It’s a philosophical line they never should’ve crossed. What made Google Google is that their web search results were better than anyone else’s, and were ordered simply by their best guess as to relevancy. Even when they introduced ads, they did it in a way that was true to the same spirit: the ads most relevant to the search terms. They profit handsomely and deservedly from this.

I think their decision to artificially promote Google plus pages above more relevant pages on competing social networks is the modern-day equivalent of the ’90s era search engines turning their homepages into “portals”. A search engine should be designed to send users quickly and accurately away to whatever sites on the Internet they’re looking for. The ’90s-era search engine portals blew this, because the whole portal idea was to keep users on their sites rather than send them away. This Google Plus integration is the same thing — an attempt to keep users on Google.com for another page view or two.

Kieran Healy: What Is the Best Virtual Reality Tool Ever?

The book, he says--or, rather, the column of print.

Kieran Healy:

Apple for the Teacher: Instapaper and the Persistence of the Textbook: In his presentation, Apple’s Phil Schiller heavily criticized the static, text-heavy format of the traditional texbook. Far better to present information dynamically with graphics, supporting illustrations, movies, interactive components and all the rest of it.

Sure, why not? But—-consider how many of the most sophisticated computer users consume "content" online, perhaps especially the ones who use iPads. Do they seek out material that looks like this? Do they want multi-modal, multimedia formats? Do they love jazzy Infographics? No. They use Instapaper or some equivalent tool to create reading lists for themselves, and to read those articles in a format that deliberately strips out a lot of the original presentation and replaces it with simple, clean, easy-to-read, blocks of text that look a lot like a well-designed piece of outmoded 1950s technology.

Why do people like Instapaper so much? It’s because they’ve chosen to read what they save, and the app lets them keep it and read it in a straightforward, uncluttered way. Finding the good stuff is the hard part, along with the ability, motivation, and opportunity to read things: once you’re there, you don’t need the dynamic illustrations or zooming or supporting illustrations. You’ll read it because you’re already interested in it, and you’ll even seek out and pay for a way to make the reading and learning experience static and simple, because you don’t want to be distracted.

A similar point applies in education. Technology by itself—-let alone Keynote transitions, animations, or what have you—-will not by themselves engage students. The promise of "technology in the classroom" has always been that it will magically "engage" students in what they have to learn. But it never does: you still need a good teacher, the opportunity to learn, and some motivation of your own. More dynamic textbooks aren’t the solution to the problem of education—-they’re not even the solution to the problem of textbooks.

It’s strange to see Apple going down this well-worn road. When the iPad was launched, a stock criticism of it was that it was a device made for consuming rather than making or doing things. Very quickly, people found ways to use it that showed it was capable of a lot more than that. Apps like GarageBand or Star Walk or Leafsnap—-there are loads more—-take advantage of the iPad’s computing power and portability in ways that put it in a different class of activity from reading textbooks or sitting working at a computer. It’s these sort of use-cases where a device like the iPad really shines. So it’s a pity that Apple has chosen to re-enter the education market with a pitch about Reinventing the Textbook that, frankly, sounds pretty old hat. The reason, I suppose, is that there’s potentially a lot of money to be made selling the things to schools as replacements for the books.

Where Kieran may be wrong--not is wrong, but may be wrong--is that he may miss the fact that humanity is divided into two groups: we for whom the column of print is the best virtual reality tool ever, and the rest of the human race for whom it is not.

We need Instapaper, a quiet room, and the Lynx browser. The rest of the human race may need the productions of iBooks Author.

Yet Another Reason Why America's Future Depends on the Rapid Collapse of the Republican Party

Greg Sargent:

Paul Ryan’s solution to inequality helps the rich, does nothing for poor: Yesterday Paul Ryan released a very serious looking report entitled: “A deeper look at inequality”… applauded by conservatives as an important contribution to the debate…. [I] ask[ed] Tim Smeeding, an expert on inequality at the University of Wisconsin, to evaluate his report. Smeeding’s verdict: Ryan’s effort is only “half serious,” fails to prove its argument about inequality, and doesn’t offer any policy prescriptions that would fix the problem as Ryan himself defines it….

Smeeding says [Ryan's] is a typical fallacy committed by those who oppose progressive taxation. Even if it’s true that the tax burden of top earners has gone up, that’s because their incomes have gone up… they now pay a smaller percentage of their overall income in taxes….

Ryan claims the real problem exacerbating inequality is not income disparity, but the lack of mobilit…. Smeeding, however, rejects this as a false choice. He says we can simultaneously make the tax system more progressive while also pursuing policies that enhance mobility. Indeed, Smeeding argues that those goals are two sides of the same policy coin — they are linked…. Smeeding adds that there are no policy prescriptions in Ryan’s report that would actually enhance mobility.

“How do you increase mobility at the bottom? You provide low income families the tools to compete in a 21st Century economy,” Smeeding says. “Create revenue to invest in the mobility of kids from poorer backgrounds — improve early childhood education, improve schools, improve chances of success, lower the cost of college. He misses the whole point about mobility, which is about increasing educational and economic opportunity.”…

Smeeding said he agreed with some stuff in Ryan’s report, such as the need to cut government health care assistance for middle income and high income elderly people. But overall, Smeeding said: “His prescriptions would help the rich, and there’s nothing here that helps the poor.”

Tim Harford: The Present of the Music Industry

Tim Harford:

There seems no objective justification for the idea that good music has simply dried up since file-sharing took off. “A digital vampire” – not the title of this season’s bestselling young adult novel, but an ageing rock star’s description of Apple’s online store, iTunes. In his recent John Peel lecture, the guitarist for The Who, Pete Townshend, railed against “the Aluminums” (Apple, I gather) and suggested changes to their business model that would be more supportive of musicians. He also wondered whether the modern, digitally distributed music industry could support the kind of careful listening and risk taking that the late DJ John Peel exemplified.

A reasonable response to Mr Townshend is that he could have picked more obvious targets – notably file-sharing sites and software, which facilitate outright piracy. (He did offer one sharp observation on the subject: “The word ‘sharing’ surely means giving away something you have earned, or made, or paid for?”) It is beyond doubt that the traditional music industry is dying: high street record shops are closing their doors or stocking alternative products, and music sales have fallen by about 40 per cent during the past decade. Digital music sales through retailers such as iTunes are manifestly failing to plug the gap from sales of physical CDs, but that is not the fault of the Aluminums.

Yet a more interesting question is how much this matters. According to Joel Waldfogel of the University of Minnesota, three-quarters of pirated music would never have been purchased anyway. In such cases the consumer gains but the producer does not lose. Alas, for the major record labels – and, perhaps, for the artists too – the one-in-four acts of piracy that do reduce sales seem to be quite enough to corrode the industry’s business model….

Waldfogel manfully attempts to estimate the continued flow of high-quality new music…. Waldfogel… produces some intuitively sensible results: the late 1960s were the pinnacle of the past 50 years, while the 1980s were dark days indeed…. Certainly there seems no objective justification for the idea that good music has simply dried up since file-sharing took off.

Quite why this should be is a puzzle, but Waldfogel suspects it has something to do with the ease with which any band can produce and distribute music – a fact reflected in the growth of independent record labels. The money may be drying up, but the beat goes on.

Charlie Stross on the Stupidity of the Publishing Companies

Charlie's Diary:

Cutting their own throats: Traditional publishing is dominated by the Big Six publishing groups…. The corporate drive for DRM is motivated by the fear of ebook piracy. But aside from piracy, the biggest ebook-related threat to the Big Six is called Amazon.com. Until 2008, ebooks were a tiny market segment, under 1% and easily overlooked; but in 2009 ebook sales began to rise exponentially, and ebooks now account for over 20% of all fiction sales…. And Amazon have got 80% of the ebook retail market….

Amazon has ruthlessly used its near monopoly of online sales to exert monopsony buying pressure against suppliers, forcing the likes of Holtzbrinck or Penguin or Hachette to give them a deep discount on ebooks…. [T]he Big Six's pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder. DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform. If you buy a book that you can only read on the Kindle, you're naturally going to be reluctant to move to other ebook platforms… and even more reluctant to buy ebooks from rival stores that use incompatible DRM….

As ebook sales mushroom, the Big Six's insistence on DRM has proven to be a hideous mistake. Rather than reducing piracy, it has locked customers in Amazon's walled garden, which in turn increases Amazon's leverage over publishers….

If the big six began selling ebooks without DRM, readers would at least be able to buy from other retailers and read their ebooks on whatever platform they wanted, thus eroding Amazon's monopoly position. But it's not clear that the folks in the boardrooms are agile enough to recognize the tar pit they've fallen into...

For-Profit Universities and Standardized Testing: Demonic Instrumentalities of Satan or Just Totally Sucky?

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Important Programming Announcement: "I’ve been offered, and have accepted, an exciting new job opportunity with Slate where I’ll be blogging and column-writing (columnizing?) about economics, business, and economic policy as the latest incarnation of Moneybox…. The blog will continue as is through Friday, Nov. 18, which will be my last day with ThinkProgress, and then on Monday the 21st, I’ll be working at Slate…

One of the true and important points that Matt periodically makes is that America gets extremely low value for the money it spends--in student fees and government subsidies--on private for-profit testing operations and universities like Stanley Kaplan. Starting on Monday the 21st, that will be the source of a portion of his salary. It will be interesting to see whether we see a rise or a fall in the frequency of Yglesias weblog posts headlined: "For-Profit Universities and Standardized Testing: Demonic Instrumentality of Satan or Just Totally Sucky?"

I've bet a not completely insignificant sum of money on the "over"...

Todd Wasserman: "Netflix Takes Up 32.7% of Internet Bandwidth [STUDY]"

Adobe Flash Is Dead on Smartphones and Tablets

Steve Jobs wins another one:

Jason Perlow: Exclusive: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5: Summary: Adobe has briefed developers on the impending cessation of mobile flash browser plugin development.

Sources close to Adobe that have been briefed on the company’s future development plans have revealed this forthcoming announcement to ZDNet:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

Additionally, the e-mail briefing to Adobe’s partners has been summed up as follows:

• Adobe is Stopping development on Flash Player for browsers on mobile.
• Adobe is now focusing their development efforts on:
  • Applications for mobile
  • Expressive content on the desktop (in and out of browser)
  • Increasing their investments in HTML5 in general

The full content and scope of the announcement is expected to be posted on the Adobe web site in the next day.

Impressive demonstration of network externalities in action…

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Yes, It Is Yet Another Washington Post Edition

UPDATE: And Brad Plumer has added a credit to Mark Thomas...

---

This morning, November 3, Brad Plumer of the *Washington Post" has a nice story “How my taxes are raised matters” citing Richard Green and Susan Mettler.

I liked this story.

I liked it two days ago, when Mark Thoma wrote it:

Mark Thoma (November 1, 2011): "How My Taxes are Raised Matters"

As I said earlier today--watching the Los Angeles Times, Larry McShane of the New York Daily News, and Sean Michaels of the Guardian do this to Spencer Ackerman of Wired--this seems to me to go beyond sloppiness into approaching some kind of mental disorder.

And in my email inbox right now is a note about Politico, comparing Jake Sherman:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/67538.html: Grover Norquist, influential? To House Speaker John Boehner, he’s just another “random” guy. At least that’s what the Ohio congressman told reporters Thursday, declining to weigh in on whether the anti-tax crusader was a positive - or negative - force within the House Republican Conference.

to David Weigel:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/11/03/boehner_on_norquist_the_random_person_.htmlThere was unexpected levity in Speaker of the House John Boehner's weekly presser, after NBC's Luke Russert mentioned that Grover Norquist, the paterfamilias of the GOP anti-tax pledges, was making rounds on the Hill. Did the Speaker think that Norquist was a positive influence on Republicans? Boehner twisted his mouth, wrestling with the premise of the question.

For Jake Sherman and Politico, it is pretty clear that not acknowledging Luke Russert is in their minds a feature and not a bug: they don't want to bring alternative news channels to the front of their readers' minds.

It is much less clear what the Los Angeles Times and Sean Michaels of the Guardian and Larry McShane of the New York Daily News by not acknowledging the existence of Wired--which is not a competitor of theirs--and thus pissing Wired off.

It makes least sense of all in the case of the Washington Post, which ought to regard Mark Thoma as an analyst-source to be cosseted rather than a competitor to be sent down the memory hole...

I Must Say I'm Very Tempted by This Conference…

Michael Froomkin writes:

University of Miami | School of Law: The University of Miami School of Law seeks submissions for "We Robot" – an inaugural conference on legal and policy issues relating to robotics to be held in Coral Gables, Florida on April 21 & 22, 2012. We invite contributions by academics, practitioners, and industry in the form of scholarly papers or presentations of relevant projects.

We seek reports from the front lines of robot design and development, and invite contributions for works-in-progress sessions. In so doing, we hope to encourage conversations between the people designing, building, and deploying robots, and the people who design or influence the legal and social structures in which robots will operate.

Robotics seems increasingly likely to become a transformative technology. This conference will build on existing scholarship exploring the role of robotics to examine how the increasing sophistication of robots and their widespread deployment everywhere from the home, to hospitals, to public spaces, and even to the battlefield disrupts existing legal regimes or requires rethinking of various policy issues.

Scholarly Papers:

Topics of interest for the scholarly paper portion of the conference include but are not limited to:

• Effect of robotics on the workplace, e.g. small businesses, hospitals, and other contexts where robots and humans work side-by-side.
• Regulatory and licensing issues raised by robots in the home, the office, in public spaces (e.g. roads), and in specialized environments such as hospitals.
• Design of legal rules that will strike the right balance between encouraging innovation and safety, particularly in the context of autonomous robots.
• Issues of legal or moral responsibility, e.g. relating to autonomous robots or robots capable of exhibiting emergent behavior.
• Issues relating to robotic prosthetics (e.g. access equity issues, liability for actions activated by conscious or unconscious mental commands).
• Relevant differences between virtual and physical robots.
• Relevant differences between nanobots and larger robots.
• Usage of robots in public safety and military contexts.
• Privacy issues relating to data collection by robots, either built for that purpose or incidental to other tasks.
• Intellectual property challenges relating to robotics as a nascent industry, to works or inventions created by robots, or otherwise peculiar to robotics.
• Issues arising from legal automation such as unauthorized practice of law or medicine.

These are only examples. We are very interested in papers on other topics as the purpose of this conference is to help set a research agenda relating to the deployment of robots in society…

Quote of the Day: October 22, 2011

"We wind a simple ring of iron with coils; we establish the connections to the generator, and with wonder and delight we note the effects of strange forces which we bring into play, which allow us to transform, to transmit and direct energy at will. We arrange the circuits properly, and we see the mass of iron and wires behave as though it were endowed with life, spinning a heavy armature, through invisible connections, with great speed and power--with the energy possibly conveyed from a great distance."

--Nikola Tesla, Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency

Toward the Patronage Intellectual Society?

Sam Harris:

The Blog : The Future of the Book : Sam Harris: Writers, artists, and public intellectuals are nearing some sort of precipice: Their audiences increasingly expect digital content to be free. Jaron Lanier has written and spoken about this issue with great sagacity. You can purchase his book here, which most of you will not do, or you can watch him discuss these matters for free. The problem is thus revealed even in the act of stating it.  How can a person like Lanier get paid for being brilliant? This has become an increasingly difficult question to answer.

Where publishing is concerned, the Internet is both midwife and executioner. It has never been easier to reach large numbers of readers, but these readers have never felt more entitled to be informed and entertained for free…. One fact now seems undeniable: The future of the written word is (mostly or entirely) digital.

Journalism was the first casualty of this transformation. How can newspapers and magazines continue to make a profit? Online ads don’t generate enough revenue and paywalls are intolerable; thus, the business of journalism is in shambles. Even though I sympathize with the plight of publishers—and share it by association as a writer—as a reader, I am without pity. If your content is behind a paywall, I will get my news elsewhere. I subscribe to the print edition of The New Yorker, but when I want to read one of its articles online, I find it galling to have to login and wrestle with its proprietary e-reader. The result is that I read and reference New Yorker articles far less frequently than I otherwise would. I’ve been a subscriber for 25 years, but The New Yorker is about to lose me. What can they do? I don’t know. The truth is, I now expect their content to be free….

Not just free: easy to access: the New Yorker's proprietary reader is a monstrous offense to usability.

Harris goes on:


My friend Christopher Hitchens is a writer of truly incandescent prose whose career has been forged almost entirely in the context of print journalism. Among his many outlets, the most prominent has probably been Vanity Fair…. I visited the site a moment ago and read Hitch’s latest: a very tender essay of praise for the work of Joan Didion…. Hitch did his job and got paid. Didion will soon publish her book in hardcover and has already benefited from his review. All appears to be well in the Kingdom of Print.

However, with the gimlet eyes of a new blogger, I detect ominous portents of change. First, I see that Hitch’s article has been featured on the Vanity Fair website for the better part of a week and has garnered only 813 Facebook likes and 75 Tweets. Many of my blog articles receive more engagement than this, some by nearly a factor of 10. No doubt this has something to do with the ratio of signal to noise: When readers come to a personal blog, they are more or less guaranteed to read what the author has written. How many people will find Hitch’s article on the Vanity Fair website?… A glance at the online page rank of the magazine raises even greater concerns. I know bloggers—Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin, for instance—whose personal blogs get more traffic than the entire Vanity Fair website….

[I]t doesn’t seem entirely crazy to wonder whether a significant percentage of the people who have read Hitch’s essay in the last week read it in the last hour because I broadcast it on social media. I used to view this as a wonderful synergy—digital enables print; print points back to digital; and both thrive. I now consider it the death knell for traditional publishing….

Where is all this heading?  I can count on one finger the number of places where it is still obviously better for me to publish than on my own blog—the opinion page of The New York Times. But it’s not so much better that I’ve been tempted to send them an article in the last few months. Is this just the hubris of the blogosphere? Maybe—but not for everyone and not for long.

Related difficulties are now looming for books…. Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem. Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing. In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life….

One thing is certain: writers and public intellectuals must find a way to get paid for what they do—and the opportunities to do this are changing quickly. My current solution is to write longer books for a traditional press and publish short ebooks myself on Amazon. If anyone has any better ideas, please publish them somewhere—perhaps on a blog—and then send me a link. And I hope you get paid.

Welcome to Siri!

Quote of the Day: October 13, 2011: Steve Job on Heathkits

"Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You'd actually build this thing yourself.

"I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that: 'I haven't built one of those but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I've built two other Heathkits so I could build that.'

"Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way."

--Steve Jobs in 1995

Finland Reached Peak Horse Only in the 1950s

Matt Edgar:

The pace of change: Finally, as David Edgerton shows in his solid and empirical book “The Shock of the Old”, the use-histories of technologies are far more elongated than we’d expect. Finland, for example, reached peak horse only in the 1950s. When will we hit peak transistor? We cannot possibly know until some time after we get there.

Brynjolfsson, Gans, Greenstein: Digitopoly--Competition in the Digital Age

http://www.digitopoly.org

One "n", one "f", two "s"es, one "n". One "n", one "f", two "s"es, one "n". One "n", one "f", two "s"es, one "n". One "n", one "f", two "s"es, one "n"…

The Drag on Economic Growth from Nathan Myhrvold, Patent Troll

Needless to say, the patent system really, really needs to be fixed: this is really, really damaging to us.

Alex Blumberg and Laura Sydell:

Intellectual Ventures And The War Over Software Patents : Planet Money : NPR: Myhrvold has more than 100 patents to his name, and he's cast himself as a man determined to give his fellow inventors their due. In 2000, he founded a company called Intellectual Ventures, which he calls "a company that invests in invention." But Myhrvold's company has a different image among many Silicon Valley insiders. The influential blog Techdirt regularly refers to Intellectual Ventures as a patent troll. IPWatchdog, an intellectual property site, called IV "patent troll public enemy #1." These blogs write about how Intellectual Ventures has amassed one of the largest patent portfolios in existence and is going around to technology companies demanding money to license these patents….

[P]eople at companies that have been approached by Intellectual Ventures don't want to talk publicly. "There is a lot of fear about Intellectual Ventures," says Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Twitter, among other companies. "You don't want to make yourself a target." Sacca wouldn't say if Intellectual Ventures had been in contact with any of the companies he's invested in. "I tried to put you in touch with other people in this community to talk to you about this and they almost uniformly said they couldn't talk to you," Sacca told us. "They were afraid to." IV has the power to "literally obliterate startups," Sacca says….

IV says it has invented a nuclear technology that's safer and greener than existing technologies. A cooler that can keep vaccines cold for months without electricity. And the world's most high-tech mosquito zapper.

But the lab is a tiny fraction of what IV does. The company has received about 1,000 patents on stuff it's come up with at the lab; it's purchased roughly 30,000 patents from other people. In fact, nothing that's come out of this lab — not the mosquito zapper, not the nuclear technology — has made it into commercial use…. Imagine an inventor out there — someone with a brilliant idea, a breakthrough. This inventor has a patent, but companies are stealing his idea. And this inventor doesn't have the money or legal savvy to stop them. That's where IV comes in. It buys this inventor's patent, and it makes sure that companies who are using the idea pay for it. When we asked for an example of an inventor in this situation, someone with a breakthrough, who wasn't getting paid for it, two separate people at IV pointed us to a guy named Chris Crawford…. So we went to talk to Chris Crawford. But that turned out to be harder than we thought — and it led us on a five month journey, where things did not quite fit the story Intellectual Ventures was telling.

When we followed up with IV to get Chris Crawford's contact info, the company told us it no longer owned Chris Crawford's patent. And Crawford probably wouldn't want to talk right now anyway, the company said, because he was in the middle of litigation. We started digging around and found Chris Crawford in Clearwater, Florida. As predicted, he never responded to our many emails and phone calls. You'll never hear from him in this story. But we were able to locate Chris's patent — number 5771354. He got it in 1998. And the way IV explained the patent to us, Chris Crawford invented something that we do all the time now: He figured out a way to upgrade the software on your home computer over the Internet. In other words, when you turn on your computer and a little box pops up and says, "Click here to upgrade to the newest version of iTunes," that was Chris Crawford's idea.

But when we looked at the patent, it seemed to claim a lot more than that. The name of the actual invention is "an online back-up system." The patent says this invention makes it possible to connect to an online service provider to do a bunch of stuff — software purchases, online rentals, data back ups, information storage. The patent makes it seem like Chris Crawford invented a lot of the most common things we do on the Internet. We weren't sure what to make of all this, so we went to see David Martin, who runs a company called M-Cam. It's hired by governments, banks and business to assess patent quality, which the company does with a fancy piece of software. We asked Martin to assess Chris Crawford's patent. At the same time Crawford's patent was being prosecuted, more than 5,000 other patents were issued for "the same thing," Martin says. Crawford's patent was for "an online backup system." Another patent from the same time was for "efficiently backing up files using multiple computer systems." Yet another was for "mirroring data in a remote data storage system." And then there were three different patents with three different patent numbers but that all had the same title: "System and method for backing up computer files over a wide area computer network."

Martin says about 30 percent of U.S. patents are essentially on things that have already been invented. In 2000, for example, the patent office granted a patent on making toast — patent number 6080436, "Bread Refreshing Method." We also asked Rick McLeod, a patent lawyer and former software engineer, to evaluate Chris Crawford's patent. "None of this was actually new," he told us….

This brings us back to Chris Crawford's patent, the patent Intellectual Ventures cited as an example of how they encourage innovation by ensuring that inventors get paid. As we've said, this patent also seems to cover a big chunk of what happens on the Internet: upgrading software, buying stuff online, and what's called cloud storage. If you have a patent on all that, you could sue a lot of people. And, in fact, that's what's happening with Chris Crawford's patent. Intellectual Venures sold it to a company called Oasis research in June of 2010. Less than a month later, Oasis Research used the patent to sue over a dozen different tech companies, including Rackspace, GoDaddy, and AT&T. We called Oasis several times, but no one ever answered the phone. For a while, the company's voice mail message directed all questions to John Desmarais , a lawyer in New York. He didn't return our phone calls, but we did track him down at an intellectual property conference in San Francisco. He cited attorney-client privilege, and wouldn't tell us anything — not even who owns Oasis Research. (He did say he's a big fan of NPR.)…

The office was in a corridor where all the other doors looked exactly the same —locked, nameplates over the door, no light coming out. It was a corridor of silent, empty offices with names like "Software Rights Archive," and "Bulletproof Technology of Texas." It turns out a lot of those companies in that corridor, maybe every single one of them, is doing exactly what Oasis Research is doing. They appear to have no employees. They are not coming up with new inventions. The companies are in Marshall, Texas because they are filing lawsuits for patent infringement. Patent lawsuits are big business in Marshall, which is part of the eastern district of Texas…. We did find one key detail about Oasis Research. It was in a legal document called a Certification of Interested Parties, which lists all the entities with a financial interest in Oasis. Tom Ewing, an intellectual property lawyer who makes a business of tracking IV, brought it to our attention. The Oasis document lists the usual parties — the plaintiff, the defendants, the attorneys involved. But it also includes one other name: Intellectual Ventures. Peter Detkin, an attorney who co-founded Intellectual Ventures with Nathan Myhrvold, told us that IV likely has a "back-end arrangement" with Oasis…. Intellectual Ventures is taking a cut of whatever money Oasis gets from its lawsuits. Oasis is a company with no operations, no products, and, as far as we can tell, no employees, that is using a very broad patent from 1998 to sue over a dozen companies.

As it happens, Detkin is the man who coined the term "patent troll." He came up with it back in in 1999, when he was working for Intel.

We asked him how it feels to make money from an entity that's behaving much like the patent trolls he once condemned. He said:

These are patents we used to hold, we no longer hold. And we ensure that we have no control over the actions of these third parties. They are independent actors. They are not Intellectual Ventures. They may be monetizing in ways we disagree with, but it's not our call….

We asked if he could point us to a patent that was languishing, but then got licensed and built. "There were two deals that were done," he said. "One was with a toy company. The other was... I can't remember the technology, it was out there last Christmas, but I don't know how it's done."…

For this story, we called people who had licensing arrangements with IV, we called people who were defendants in lawsuits involving IV patents, we called every single company being sued by Oasis Research. No one would talk to us. Part of this is probably fear. Part of it is the fact that agreements with Intellectual Ventures include a non-disclosure agreement that's rumored to be the strictest in Silicon Valley...

As at Least Three Senior Journalists Have Remarked to Me, on a Good Day We Learn More from Ezra Klein than from the National News Staff of [Insert U.S. Newspaper Name Here]

Somebody in Washington Post management seems to have noticed. Jim Romanesko:

WP hires three bloggers to work with Ezra Klein: They are Suzy Khimm, who leaves Mother Jones; Sarah Kliff, formerly of Politico; and Brad Plumer, a New Republic associate editor. The Post memo is after the jump:

The Financial staff is thrilled to announce that we’ve hired three talented bloggers to work with Ezra Klein. Stay tuned, because we’ll have more to say about these plans. But in the meantime, please welcome our new colleagues, who all start July 25:

• Suzy Khimm, who comes to us from Mother Jones, where she covered Congress, politics and domestic policy. Previously a staff member at The New Republic, she has also contributed to the Economist, Newsweek, Slate, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal Asia, the Christian Science Monitor and Los Angeles Times. From 2006-7, Suzy was an associate editor for the English-language Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. She also spent two years in Rio de Janeiro, reporting on urban violence in Brazil’s prisons and shantytowns.

• Sarah Kliff, who joins us from Politico, where she covered how federal regulation, Congress and lobbying affect the implementation of health care reform. She also was an author of Politico Pulse, a daily health policy briefing. Prior to Politico, Sarah was a staff writer at Newsweek, reporting on issues at the intersection of health policy and politics. She covered the 2008 election for Newsweek, traveling with Vice President Joe Biden. Sarah is the recipient of reporting fellowships from both the Kaiser Family Foundation and University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism. Her writing has appeared in National Geographic, the BBC, Humanities Magazine and St. Louis Magazine.

• Brad Plumer, who was previously an associate editor at The New Republic, where he reported on the environment and energy issues and wrote TNR’s green blog, The Vine, for three years. Before that, he was an assistant Web editor at Mother Jones. His work has appeared in Audubon, New York, Foreign Policy, The National and The Journal of Life Sciences.

So how much of an equity/option stake in Stanley Kaplan Daily does Ezra get? Seems to me he deserves one..

Toward a Non-Insane Intellectual Property System

Cory Doctorow:

University of Michigan to stop worrying about lawsuits, start releasing orphan works: Bobbyg sez, "The University of Michigan Library will be sharing digital copies of their orphan works, that is, copyrighted works which have no identifiable owner, with the University community. Paul Courant, the University Librarian, says that the project is integral to the mission of the library, and that the sharing of the orphan works is a 'fair use' of the material, stating that 'sharing these orphan works does no economic harm to any person or organization, while not doing so harms scholarship and learning...'"

The Orphan Works Project is being led by the Copyright Office of the University of Michigan Library to identify orphan works. Orphan works are books that are subject to copyright but whose copyright holders cannot be identified or contacted. Our immediate focus is on digital books held by HathiTrust, a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future.

This effort is funded by the HathiTrust and is part of U-M Library's ongoing efforts to understand the true copyright status of works in its collection. As part of this effort, the Library will develop policies, processes, and procedures that can be used by other HathiTrust partners to replicate a task that will ultimately require the hand-checking of millions of volumes.

Bravo/a. I have no idea what will come of this, but pulling the default position of libraries, archives, and other institutions from one of debilitating fear or lawsuits to one of bravely sharing is something long past needed.

On Wikipedia

Jame Fallows sends us to Mark Bernstein:

Something Entertaining, If You're Feeling Smart: Students of Web phenomenon are naturally tempted to regard the Web as part of Nature, that it unfolds as it always has and, more or less, as it ought or must. But the Web is still new, and quite recently it was entirely possible to envision that the World Wide Web would be quite different from the Web we know. As late as 1993, for example, expert consensus held that the cost of persuading a core of writers and publishers to contribute a small library's worth of information to a public docuverse might be a mere trillion dollars; not only was the estimate quantitatively off target, but the sign was wrong...

Why Have I Never Read This?

Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times.

And why have neither Harcourt nor Lotte Kohler put it up on the web yet?

I Think the Answer Is "Yes" (Broken Intellectual Property System and Bad Actors Department)

Will Shipley:

(1) Twitter / Home: Nathan Myhrvold: Egotistical patent troll, or the lowest form of life on Earth?

Josh Rosenthall:

Is Nathan Myhrovld’s Intellectual Ventures behind the iOS in-app purchase patent troll job?: It’s been confirmed today that a company called Lodsys recently sent out a number of letters to independent iOS developers, including James Thompson - the developer of PCalc - and Dave Castelnuovo, creator of Pocket God , informing them that their use of in-app purchases in iOS infringes upon on this particular patent. Of course, Lodsys is going after small developers who lack the resources of larger development companies to fight back, presumably to frighten them into striking a licensing deal as soon as possible.

So who exactly is behind this unabashed case of patent trolling?

Well, we did a little leg work and though we can’t say with 100% certainty who is pulling the strings, it’s looking a lot like Intellectual Ventures is behind this disgraceful lawsuit. Intellectual Ventures was founded in part by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The company’s business model is simple - it purchases and applies for a ton of patents. It then licenses out those patents to others under the threat of litigation coupled with a promise not to sue if a deal is struck.

Aggregating Aggregative Aggregators

Felix Salmon starts with some throat-clearing:

The business of digital journalism: CJR... a 146-page report... “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism”. It includes the story of Gabriel Sherman’s 463-word story on nymag.com about Roger Ailes and Sarah Palin, and Jack Mirkinson’s 237-word distillation of the story for HuffPo.... [T]he HuffPo version was still much more popular than the original. The CJR report doesn’t examine why... the fact that HuffPo’s story is in its headline, for instance, while NYMag went cryptic with “Going Rogue on Ailes Could Leave Palin on Thin Ice”, and didn’t get to the actual news until the third paragraph. But the anecdote packs a punch all the same: if you blather on too long, people are liable to ignore you.

So let me try to find some of the good bits for you, since I know you’re not going to read the whole thing, and especially because the most interesting stuff — at least as far as I’m concerned — doesn’t even begin until page 110...

And since you are unlikely to surf over to or read all of Felix Salmon, let me try to find some of his good stuff for you. Felix:

Business Class Journalism?

Oliver Reichenstein:

Information Architects – Business Class: Freemium for News?: I had a perspective changing talk on the subject of pay walls with the chief executive of a big publishing company (no, I can’t tell you who). He asked me what I think about pay walls. I told him what I always say: The main currency of news sites is attention and not dollars and that I believe that it is his job, as a publisher, to turn that attention into money to keep the attention machine running. He nodded and made the following, astonishing statement:

I can’t see pay walls working out either. But we need to do something before we lose all of our current subscribers. Sure. It’s a tough business environment, but… But the flight industry is a tough environment too, and they found ways. So tell me: Why do people fly Business Class? In the end, an airplane brings me to the same place regardless of whether I fly Economy or Business Class and the massive price-increase I pay doesn’t compare the difference in value.

He asked whether I knew of a way to apply this logic to online news. What would a Business Class news site look like? People pay for Business Class because they don’t want to be tortured in Economy. They get faster lanes at the terror check. They get an extra glass of champagne. The stewards are more attentive. They get off the plane more quickly. They get the feeling of a higher social status. And he added that he wished that there was a way to lead each reader through the business class to Economy again and again to show him what he misses....

Pay walls weaken the main attractor (content) of your site and complicates the user experience (login on different platforms). Some leave social media back doors for pro users, but that’s not a good long term strategy either.... The idea of creating a business around the terrible online news experience is not that extravagant: Instapaper, Readability, FlipBoard & Co. are already profiting from the terrible reading experience of current news sites....

How would a business class version of a news site look in detail? We are currently working on a behind the scenes consulting project dealing with that problem.... No, you don’t need to make the free one ugly on purpose (apparently, they purposely torture us in Economy class). The traditional CPV/ad model design requirements will do the job for you.... Business Class idea would only work for titles like The New Yorker, Die Zeit, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Monde.... So here is our question for you: as a regular reader of Le Monde, NYT, or Die Zeit, how much would you be ready to pay for a Business Class version of your news site?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? New York Times Edition

Felix Salmon explains why every day that Bill Keller remains at the head of the New York Times diminishes its chances for long-run survival. Much of it is standard Clayton Christienson clueless-management-keeping-an-organization-from-dealing-with-disruptive technological change:

Felix Salmon: The hermetic and arrogant New York Times: The NYT employs some of the smartest and ablest users and analysts of social media: it’s probably the most sophisticated newspaper in America on that front. And then it has dinosaurs like Bill Keller and Arthur Brisbane, whose respective columns this weekend betray the fact that the people with the bully pulpits are stuck in a completely different world, seemingly ignorant of some of the biggest stories in social media. Brisbane... the NYT’s... describes the way that the paper broke the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Well, he can’t do that, because the NYT didn’t break the news... he ignores the people who did break the news, and just tells the story of how the official NYT machine worked. His story starts at 10:34 last Sunday night, when a source told NYT reporter Helene Cooper that Osama had been killed. By 10:40, an alert was up on nytimes.com. Then, by Brisbane’s account, Twitter got involved.... All of [Brisbane's] links are internal; none are to the actual tweets in question....

The Great Ephemeralization

Tim Berners-Lee T.B. Lee:

Daring Fireball: The Great Ephemeralization: For example, a couple of years ago, Google waved a magic wand that transformed millions of Android phones into sophisticated navigation devices with turn-by-turn directions. This was functionality that people had previously paid hundreds of dollars for in stand-alone devices. Now it’s just another feature that comes with every Android phone, and the cost of Android phones hasn’t gone up. I haven’t checked, but I bet that this wealth creation was not reflected in GDP statistics. And it’s actually worse than that: as people stop buying stand-alone GPS devices, Google’s innovation will actually show up in the statistics as a reduction in GDP. […]

But the real lesson here may not be that the American economy is stagnating, but rather that the government is bad at measuring improvements in our standard of living that come from the software industry.

Sufficient Cause for Breaking Cambridge University Press's Copyright

I think it's time for somebody to scan and upload Keynes's Collected Writings...

Zunguzungu: Why Arianna Huffington is Bill Keller’s Somali Pirate

Patrick Nielsen Hayden sends us to Zunguzungu:

Why Arianna Huffington is Bill Keller’s Somali Pirate :

“In Somalia this would be called piracy.” -Bill Keller

“Africa, as an idea, a concept, has historically served, and continues to serve, as a polemical argument for the West’s desperate desire to assert its difference from the rest of the world.” -Achille Mbembe

Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis and Felix Salmon (and Felix Salmon) and all sorts of people have been following and commenting on the New York Times’ rhetorical war against Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post.... To understand Bill Keller’s first op-ed, for example, a piece of screed called “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate”... we need to look past the surface level confrontation.... [W]hile Huffington’s response to Keller got at some of what is most silly and self-serving about his silly and self-serving little diatribe (“patting himself on the back so hard I’d be surprised if he didn’t crack a rib,” as she puts it, is certainly apt).... [T]his particular argument... hinges on the “theft” of words and the “convergence” between new and old media.... [T]his isn’t an argument about anything. What they are most concretely at odds about in that exchange — the little piece of intellectual property which Keller claims Huffington stole from him, and which she then claims he stole from her — is a painfully banal cliché, the notion that old media and new media are “converging.” I don’t care who said it first, and neither should you, because at this point, this is not an idea that can be stolen, any more than one could steal the idea that politicians are corrupt, the American people are getting a raw deal, farmers are suffering, and we need to get back to basics if America is going to be great again. You cannot patent a cliché. Which is why that non-argument demonstrates what’s most interesting — and illustrative — about this exchange: since they are saying the same thing, what they are fighting about is who is going to be privileged with the right to say it.

To put this another way, what is interesting here is that both Keller and Huffington want to say the same thing: they agree on the fact that Real Journalists can and should do Real Journalism, and so they try to portray the other as a mere thief of words, an unimportant parasite.... Aggregators are pirates, while Real Journalists do Real Journalism. And what are Real Journalists? People who aren’t pirate aggregators.

The real problem, however, is that journalists are, by their nature, thieves of words. You can call it what you like; you can say “Possibly I am old-fashioned,” and talk about how “actual journalists are laboring at actual history, covering the fever of democracy in Arab capitals and the fever of austerity in American capitals” (Keller) or you can brag about the “148 full-time editors, writers, and reporters engaged in the serious, old-fashioned work of traditional journalism” (Huffington), but all this “old fashioned” stuff is just a way of covering over something really basic about what “actual” journalists “traditionally” do, all the time: write down what other people say.

They can exercise editorial discretion in how they integrate and harmonize the various quotes they‘ve aggregated. They can confirm, they can contextualize, and they can (very rarely) manage to witness something with their own two eyes. They can produce collages out of stolen scraps. And they should do these things. But at the core of the journalistic process is the act, inescapably, of taking other people’s texts, weaving them together, and then placing them under your byline (with appropriate citation) and profiting from the activity.

The more you talk about piracy, it seems to me, the more you bump into the uncomfortable fact that journalism is only distinguishable from word-piracy because, and to the extent that, we arbitrarily decide that it is.... [W]hile those conventions are under particular stress right now (file this under “the internet”) they were also never quite as stable as we might have liked to think they were.... That line of thinking, however, would take the conversation in a different direction than either Keller or Huffington want it to go. This is because they are not, a such, interested in the social function of “the press”... but rather, in the business of profiting from their activities.... “Real Journalism” talk... is just market fetishizing, a way of mystifying the work of social production that makes “news” possible, so that it can appear to be the original creation of whoever is selling it to you. Never mind all the different people whose unpaid contributions made the production of the story possible (the original tipoff, unquoted sources, quoted subjects, the reference works consulted, etc); they will not be paid or credited for intellectual labor, because of the magic thing that happens when the story has been published: having become news, it will subsequently be considered the sole production of the New York Times or whoever. And if Arianna Huffington steals it, now, she becomes indistinguishable from a Somali pirate....

Exactly so: when posturing in front of the FCC (or in front of customers), journalists will need to make Real Journalism seem as clear and unambiguous as possible, so that they can lay secure claim to being it. Since everyone has agreed to agree that Real Journalism is important to democracy, the people who try to sell their Real Journalism will receive the social sanction for doing so only to the extent that they can clarify and lay claim to their status as such.... Which is where the Somali pirates enter the picture: since journalistic products do not have value without their claim to a stable originality that will never really obtain in practice, people like Keller and Huffington will find it necessary to lay claim to being Real Journalists by conjuring up the figure of the Not Real Journalist.... [W]hat more perfectly illegitimate aggregator of other people’s hard earned capital than the metaphor made real in Somalia?

$1700 Per Capita per Year in Consumer Surplus from Personal Computers...

That's an increment to net worth of about $10 trillion nationwide--roughly a fifth of the value of our physical capital stock from the ideas involved in making personal computers.

Mark Whitehouse reports:

Number of the Week: $1,700: The annual benefit the average American derives from personal computers.... Karen Kopecky and Jeremy Greenwood... calculate how much value, or “utility”, American consumers derive from a given amount of computing power. They then looked at how much we actually paid for that computing power, in the form of desktop PCs, laptops, notebooks , software and so on. The difference, known as the “welfare gain”, is the benefit we get from personal computers above and beyond what we pay for them. Back in the days of magnetic-tape memory, the annual benefit was pretty small — somewhere between zero and about $6 for the average American, adjusted for inflation, depending on the method of calculation. But by 2009, the price of computing power had fallen more than 99.8% and personal computers had become a lot better and more widely used. As a result, the welfare gain rose to somewhere between $1,300 and $2,100 per person, the economists’ estimates suggest. Ballpark average: $1,700.

Julian Sanchez: Things That Are Irrelevant to Copyright Policy

Julian Sanchez:

Things That Are Irrelevant to Copyright Policy: Sometimes individual creators decide it’s in their best interests to transfer rights to their works—a song, a movie, a story, a character—to big, faceless, generally unsympathetic corporations. This should have exactly no impact on anyone’s view about the proper scope of the underlying right. Yes, sometimes people are hoodwinked into making unwise deals, and that’s bad and unfair—but it’s a kind of generic sad fact about life and contracts and whatnot, with no special significance in the realm of copyright. Often, the value of a right derives primarily from the ability to transfer it, and doing so will genuinely be in the best interest of the creator. So if you think that underling right is properly defined and deserving of respect when held by the creator, it is exactly equally deserving of respect when voluntarily sold to an entity you might not particularly like.

Sometimes, on the other hand, rights are retained by independent and sympathetic creators, who unsurprisingly want those rights to be as expansive as possible, and object to either general narrowing of those rights or the recognition of any number of “fair use” exceptions. These will often be wonderful, likeable, creative people, and the correct policy response to these objections as such is: Cry me a fucking river; now piss off.

Wise assessment of copyright policy should have nothing to do with how you feel about the person or entity who holds the right at any particular time, because copyright policy is not about identifying wonderful and meritorious people and ensuring—certainly not as an end in itself, anyway—that their income is proportioned to their intrinsic moral desert—or lack thereof. We are all the massive beneficiaries of millennia of accumulated human scientific knowledge and cultural output, and not one of us did anything do deserve a jot of it. We’re all just extremely lucky not to have been born cavemen. The greatest creative genius alive would be hard pressed to create a smiley faced smeared in dung on a tree trunk without that huge and completely undeserved inheritance.

So banish the word “deserve” from your mind when you think about copyright. Nobody “deserves” a goddamn thing. (I say this, for what it’s worth, as someone who makes his living entirely through the production of “intellectual property.”) The only—the only—relevant question is whether a marginal restriction on the general ability to use information incentivizes enough additional information production over the long run to justify denying that marginal use to every other human being on the planet, whether for simple consumption or further creation. That’s an empirical question, and while I strongly suspect the answer will generally be “not by a longshot” beyond a whole lot more limited level of protection than we currently provide, I’m happy to be persuaded otherwise along any particular dimension. But if you want to make an argument that turns in any significant respect on how unlikeable big corporations are or how marvelous creative people are… well, spare me. And the rest of us. Because in both cases it’s probably true, but as a policy matter, nobody should really give a damn.