links for 2009-09-30
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Patrick Nielsen Hayden Sends Us to David Carr: Washington Post to Staff Twitterers: Watch Your MouthMainstream outlets who gag social media efforts are unilaterally disarming in the ongoing war for reader attention. Reporters and editors would all like to mouth off at will and transgress as we wish, but our online identities are inexorably wrapped up with our professional ones. Every time a reporter hits send, he or she might do the following exercise: How would I feel if my mother and/or my boss read this? Because they well might, along with the legions of folks who sit, like crows on a wire, looking for any wiggle or wobble from media outlets they regard with suspicion in the first place. There will be stumbles and missteps on the way to a hybrid future, but if you can’t trust the women and men who put out your newspaper to use their keyboards wisely regardless of platform, what are they doing working for you?
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I think Robert Samuelson is a smart guy, and when the occasion calls for center-right curmudgeonly criticism, he's usually the center-right curmudgeon I seek out. But his column today is just weird.
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The enormity of the current financial collapse raises the question whether the crisis could have been predicted. This is the second of two Economic Letters on the topic. This Letter examines research suggesting that early warning models would not have accurately predicted the relative severity of the current crisis across countries, casting doubt on the ability of such models to forecast similar crises in the future.
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Economic mobility might be a “unifying and core tenet of the American Dream,” but the evidence suggests that the United States performs badly
