I just sent the following comment to the NYTimes: “The presumed perpetrator on the plane [i.e., the 12/25 incident on the Amsterdam -Detroit flight ] is now set to be arraigned tomorrow for “attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction”. This is an absurd and unnecessary conflation of terms. “WMD” originally meant something like a nuclear weapon, which could have killed many thousands of people. Now, setting off an explosive on a plane is […]
Paul Krugman in Sunday’s NYT has an article entitled “How Did Economists Get it so Wrong?” It’s fine as far as it goes, I think, but it misses so much, since it just focuses on financial economics. No mention of the growing wealth inequality in the US and its effects, such as forcing people to buy on credit, or using their homes a piggy banks (as long as the price was supposedly rising). No mention […]
I am not a big fan of the numerical sociologists of the Internet , Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman., but I thought for a bit they had finally come up with something interesting with their paper “Persistence and Success in the Attention Economy”. Their data reveal a seeming paradox: the more videos a person uploads on YouTube, the less likely the video will be an attention success, that is will garner more than 1% […]
To continue my study of the causes and possible cures of the meltdown, I want to discuss how there have seemed to be three different routes to making money. I do this in the context of my general prediction for over a decade, which has been that the attention economy will eventually replace the money-industrial economy, in all variants, including capitalism. This means that money will eventually be outmoded. For an early version of this […]
Re blogged from Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 with very slight changes: This blog focuses on the coming of the Attention Economy. Every so often, I shall remind new (and even old) readers of what I mean by this term. The basic idea is that we are moving toward a new kind of economy, wildly different from any before. An economy in this sense is system of actions and transactions of some kind involving scarce but […]
[Note: this is another entry in my attempt to make sense of the crash and see how it is tied to the Attention Economy. Some earlier entries are here, here, here, here and here.] I attended an informative, thought-provoking and amusing talk by Prof. Brad DeLong of UC Berkeley on Tuesday on the financial crisis “of 2007-2009” (he expects the crisis to have diminished by the end of this year). (The talk was part of […]
There has been much discussion of leadership at Apple recently. Is Steve Jobs indispensable? Short answer: “yes” In fact: “absolutely.” Jobs is the star we pay attention to through all Apple outpourings. Even in the unlikely even that an Apple user or would-be user, or even hater, has not heard Jobs’s name, or seen him on video or in a photo, what that person would most likely align to as special behind Apple products is […]
How should companies operate when appearing to be an attention payer as well as being an attention getter is crucial for their survival. Not this way. A service that shall remain nameless sent me a notice that I would soon be billed for year’s worth of service I had already paid for. The very lengthy “chat” recorded here ensued. Here are some observations of how not to pretend to pay attention that this expereince […]
Thoughts emerging from a conversation with Sandra Luft of San Francisco State U (who bears no responsibility though): “Who am I?” Or, “Who are you?“ How we answer such questions clearly changes over time. One of the main ways, though, has been with a narrative, a personal story that describes how one ended up where one is and who one is now. The story takes in the key experiences that seemed to cause one to […]
In yesterday’s (12/28/08) NY Times “Week in Review” section, two articles (on the same page) are worth comment. “Boobs” The first is “Contemplating the Boobs We Were” by Peter Applebome. He argue correctly that Americans don’t understand enough about economics. Then he suggests that this topic should be taught in high school, or at the very least students should be taught of the joys of compound interest in savings, and the pitfalls of it as […]