Whimsley

Why oh why can't we have a better academia?

I have been in a sour mood all day, and that is going to spill over into this mean-spirited post. Too bad.

The original reasons for my foul temper had nothing to do with online things or with academia, but then the Internet made it worse.

Reading Carnegie Mellon University's Cosma Shalizi (excluded from the title) is always enlightening and usually lifts my spirits, but today he points us to a poor article by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine. I made the mistake of following the link and my sour mood deepened.

Then I see that Anita Elberse of Harvard Business School has actually looked at some data behind the same Chris Anderson's Long Tail hypothesis (please, don't call it a theory) and, not surprisingly found it misguided. You would think that would cheer me up, but reading Anderson's response just (here and reprinted here) plunged me further into gloom. Why? Because although he loses this battle (if asked I will bore people with the details, but I really don't think there is a point), sloppy business journalism has won the war.

Face it. Chris Anderson now has people at Harvard Business School of all places spending their valuable time following up his idle speculations. He comes up with a half-baked idea, has basically no data to support it, and yet here are academics - smart people, with tenure, real jobs and things to do - actually spending their time following up these idle daydreams; acting as his research assistants. What a waste.

And that's not all. Here are other people - like Princeton University's Ed Felten, Drew Conway from New York University, Fernando Pereira from the University of Pennsylvania and John Timmer who teaches at Cornell - smart people who work in universities, and probably with families and friends who could use their attention - who feel they have to spend their time explaining a few of the reasons why he is wrong in his latest screed. And here is Russ Roberts of George Mason University giving the man an hour of respectful time in his weekly economics podcast. And here I am (although I ain't no academic, that's my excuse) wasting my evening writing this junk.

Journalists and popular science or technology writers should take the serious thoughts of others and communicate them in an interesting and attention-getting way. But now everything is back-to-front. How do a few stories from a business journalist set the research agenda of Harvard Business School and claim the attention of otherwise intelligent academics?

The intellectual agenda has been derailed by snake-oil sellers. Why has academia let it happen?

(Title, of course, stolen from the impeccable academic Brad DeLong)

My New Book: Explosion!TM

I am excited to announce that I am finally ready to write my next book. It's going to be great. And here's the best thing of all: you can help me write it!

It's about the Internet and how it's changing the world. I've got the outline done and I was just thinking I need a research assistant to fill in the details. Then I thought - well, why just one? There are a million research assistants out there - let's crowdsource!

Any book about the Internet needs a big idea. Not just a kind-of-big idea either, but a Great-Big-Fuck-Off-Massive Idea. The kind of idea that is so big you can't get your head round it, and yet which you can put in a short phrase so you can trademark it. My Idea is that there are now more ideas in the world than ever before. What's more, these ideas are not just stuck inside people's heads doing nothing, but thanks to the Internet everyone is putting their ideas out there for the world to see. And then these ideas spark other ideas. So with more ideas than ever before, and better ways of getting ideas acted on, the future just has to be insanely great.

We are living in an explosion of ideas. That's where the title comes from. I thought of calling it "A Hundred Flowers" because that sounds a bit more classy and intellectual, but then I thought maybe Maoism isn't where I should be going with this one and Explosion!^TM is probably more catchy.

Here is my outline. I'm thinking I'll post it on a wiki somewhere and all you great people can just work on it right there. Then I'll take it to the publisher and we'll see how it goes. Hey - you may even get an acknowledgement in a best selling book!

Explosion!^TM

Why there are more ideas in the world than ever before and why the future will be amazing

Chapter 1. The Internet is Brilliant

- An Inspiring Story
I'm starting with the true tale of an everyday white teenage boy from a middle-class family in California - a university drop out shunned by classmates and living in a deprived environment except for his state-of-the art computer network and online poker winnings, who toiled for years in obscurity only to suddenly hit it rich thanks to the viral spread of his amazing Idea.

I'd like you to find that story.

It doesn't have much to do with the rest of the book, but it needs to get the reader fired up. The right story will show how in these days of meritocratic digital democracy anyone can become a visionary leader in the radically crazy, wild west world that is the Internet. Pretty cool eh?

- The Idea.
I've already told you what The Idea is. I got it this afternoon when I was thinking about what to write about for my next book. Where can I get an idea, I thought? Well, I thought, you can get anything you want at Alice's Internet (that's a joke). So I looked on the internet and there are all these ideas out there and I thought - wow, that's a lot of ideas. Probably more than ever before. And that's how The Idea was born.

Chapter 2. The New World Of Ideas

If you were an author you would know that after presenting The Idea you have to make it plausible. Not in detail, but just enough to keep the reader moving along. And that's what this chapter is for.

Have you ever thought about how many ideas there are in the world? No? Well I'll tell you. There are millions and millions. If you google the word "idea" you get 725 million pages. Now that's what I call a lot of ideas.

In the old days ideas only came from Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. I mean, Bertrand Russell was a Lord for Christ's sake. And how many Lords are there? Not many, that's how many. Now there are Internet entrepreneurs in Bulgaria and Ghana? Who knew? Is the Internet fantastic or what?

I'll finish the chapter with the story of Stelios Haji-Ioannou. You probably haven't heard of him because you are not an author. He is not only disabled, but he comes from Greek Cyprus of all god-forsaken places and yet he started the successful company easyJet when he was only 28. I don't know much about him yet but his story sounds like a great way to wrap up the chapter. Actually he's not disabled, but his name does appear at the top of the list when you google "disabled entrepreneur" and that's surely close enough.

Chapter 3. The History of Ideas

After that high-speed opening it's time to go all academic and reflective. You'd know that if you were an author. I'll talk about all those greek guys (not Stelios; the old ones like Plato and Socrates) Then I'll say - get this - that there were only a few thousand people around who could even read back then never mind think (note to research assistant - get a real number for this will you? and make it small) and now there are like 6 billion of us. So if you do the arithmetic there are probably about a million Platos alive right now and a million Socrates and on and on. Whew! I bet that makes you think.

Now you might say "that's impressive, but how can we find these ideas?" But thanks to the Internet we can find them because we are all connected. Wow.

I have to demonstrate my credibility in this chapter so it will take some serious googling to come up with obscure stories about the Greeks. Maybe the thing to do is not talk about Plato and Socrates but someone really obscure like Heraclitus because that sounds way more sophisticated and esoteric. Wikipedia says that "he is known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe" and if my book isn't about change I don't know what is, so that's a great tie in right there.

Chapter 4. Why the World Was Miserable Before the Internet

This chapter is about the 20th century, before the Internet came along.

I'll start in the 1950's. Everyone wore the same clothes and it was like the whole world was filled with creepy borg-like automatons except without the implants. I'm going to write the whole chapter in black and white just to emphasize how few bright and colourful ideas there were. I mean, there was just nothing going on.

Then there was the 1960's, which only had two ideas: peace and love. It was nice and all, but it was pretty simple and naive when we look back at it from our hyper-linked present.

The 1970's I think I'll skip over, because fashions were pretty bad and computers weren't really happening yet so I don't think there were many ideas about then. There was punk music and space travel, so that's two, but they were pretty lame really.

No one really knows anything about the 1980's any more, but I think it's the key to the whole story. The 1980's were the decade of the personal computer, of the first incarnation of Apple, of chaos theory, and of the growth of Japan which is always good for a few paragraphs.

Then 1990s is all globalization and stuff, so that'll be OK. And the beginnings of the Internet, so it'll be, like, the big bang that started everything off. I think I'll do a whole bit about the first web page because stories are so much better than boring facts and who knew what that very first page was going to lead to? No one, that's who.

Chapter 5. The Economics of Ideas

This is the chapter with some really serious thinking in it. There used to be these things called transaction costs that prevented new ideas getting out there. Thinks like checking the results of research or getting a research paper accepted or finding a publisher for your book, or even doing all those complicated experiments and stuff that took just forever and never really worked out the way they should have done. It was a real pain in the neck is what I hear - it's not surprising there were so few ideas around.

But now all those obstacles have gone and anyone can just have an idea and publish it on the Internet and the whole world can see it. It's like there's a Long Tail of ideas and now we can get all those ideas in the tail and put them on the Internet when they used to just go nowhere because of transaction costs.

I've done some research to look at how many pages you get if you google for "idea" in the last 24 hours, etc. Here's what I found.

Time Period	Number of ideas (millions)
24 hours	11.9
past week	9.9
past month	19.7
past 2 months	28
past 3 months	31.4
past 6 months	40.6
past year	51.6
any time	725

That means over 1% of all ideas ever have been had in the last 24 hours! I mean, I know Google exaggerates the number of recent events and I'll make sure to say that you can't really treat this as rigorous but that's still pretty amazing. Someone should do a Ph.D. on that - there's an idea for you, for free.

Chapter 6. With Enough Eyeballs, All Ideas Are Shallow

Most people think ideas need a lot of thinking to come up with, and now we can't even read a short story without getting bored, so where are these ideas coming from? Actually there's a simple answer - open source.

A big idea is really just a whole lot of little ideas stuck together.

It used to be that one person had to sit down in a garret or something and think of all these little ideas and string them together until they got a big idea. Now they just put their little ideas on the Internet and then other people see them and add their own bits and before you know where you are all those individual bits have added up to give a big idea, without anyone having to work hard at all!

I'll talk about how many people contribute to Wikipedia and how Facebook was a great idea so that people could talk to each other without talking and how Google just collects all those great ideas and makes them available for free.

Chapter 7 and 8 and 9. The Next Big Idea

In a book with a Big Idea this is the tough part. A single idea is pretty tough to stretch into a whole book, and if you're not careful somewhere after the half way point there's just not a lot left to say. I think the thing here is to get a whole bunch of ideas that are out there right now and put them in these chapters and see which ones take off. Maybe we'll do Chapter 6 on culture, Chapter 7 on science, and Chapter 8 on social networking. Should be fun. What ideas can you find?

Chapter 10. The Idea Singularity is Here

A book called Explosion! has just got to finish with a bang.

So here's my big finish. Some ideas die out once they have been thought of. Like the bicycle: once someone had thought of the bicycle, nothing much else happened to it for a long time. At least I guess it didn't, and who would know if it did? But some ideas are a launchpad for other new ideas. Like when Newton had the idea of gravity - it wasn't all over and done with, he started off a whole new set of ideas.

If every idea can get picked up by other people then that means ideas spread like a virus. An idea infects other people as it goes through society. So with more connections between people (like the Internet) more ideas get picked up and fewer ideas die out. I think we're about to reach a tipping point where each idea will give rise to more than one idea. And that means the number of ideas is just going to go crazy. I mean, you think we have a lot of ideas now - just you wait. Give it a few years and this world is going to be Idea Planet. It's going to be fucking great.

So that's the book. Are you ready? Get working!

Graph of the Week: Global Cement Use

Number one in a series of, well, probably one. Nevertheless, makes yer fink, no?

From The Oil Drum.

The comments thread on the post at the Oil Drum is, to someone who never thinks about the wonders of cement, mind boggling. Did you know that there are 7-level residential high rises in Yemen made from mud-brick that have lasted for 500 years? Neither did I.

dog blogging

Avoid the Average: A Tale of Two Op-Eds

Imagine a society where everyone gets the same income. Then the income of one quarter of the population suddenly increases by a factor of five while the income of the other three quarters stays the same. How would we compare the society before and after this jolt of riches? Here are some common reactions:

• The average income has doubled. The new world is better than the old.
• Most people in the society have seen no change. The new world is not really different from the old world.
• There is increased inequality. The new world will be marked by unequal access to power and by failing democratic institutions. The new world is worse than the old.
• ... and on and on. You know the drill.
  

The standard positions have been hashed out ad nauseam, but two recent op-eds in the New York Times prompt this challenge: Avoid using the words "on average" in your reaction to the stories they tell - no matter how tempting you find it.

The first op-ed was back in February by Michael Cox and Richard Alm, and was called You Are What You Spend:

To understand why consumption is a better guideline of economic prosperity than income, it helps to consider how our lives have changed. Nearly all American families now have refrigerators, stoves, color TVs, telephones and radios. Air-conditioners, cars, VCRs or DVD players, microwave ovens, washing machines, clothes dryers and cellphones have reached more than 80 percent of households.

...[T]his wasn’t always so. The conveniences we take for granted today usually began as niche products only a few wealthy families could afford. In time, ownership spread through the levels of income distribution as rising wages and falling prices made them affordable in the currency that matters most — the amount of time one had to put in at work to gain the necessary purchasing power.

At the average wage, a VCR fell from 365 hours in 1972 to a mere two hours today. A cellphone dropped from 456 hours in 1984 to four hours. A personal computer, jazzed up with thousands of times the computing power of the 1984 I.B.M., declined from 435 hours to 25 hours. Even cars are taking a smaller toll on our bank accounts: in the past decade, the work-time price of a mid-size Ford sedan declined by 6 percent.

According to this story, inequality creates markets for luxury products that, over time, we all come to enjoy. Are you saying to yourself "yes, that's it - the new world is indeed better than the old" or do you find yourself opposing the story - "wait a minute, that's outweighed by other changes"? Well either way, stop now.

The second op-ed was last week by Amartya Sen, and was called The Rich Get Hungrier:

[A] country with a lot of poor people suddenly experiences fast economic expansion, but only half of the people share in the new prosperity. The favored ones spend a lot of their new income on food, and unless supply expands very quickly, prices shoot up. The rest of the poor now face higher food prices but no greater income, and begin to starve. Tragedies like this happen repeatedly in the world.

A stark example is the Bengal famine of 1943, during the last days of the British rule in India. The poor who lived in cities experienced rapidly rising incomes, especially in Calcutta, where huge expenditures for the war against Japan caused a boom that quadrupled food prices. The rural poor faced these skyrocketing prices with little increase in income.

Misdirected government policy worsened the division. The British rulers were determined to prevent urban discontent during the war, so the government bought food in the villages and sold it, heavily subsidized, in the cities, a move that increased rural food prices even further. Low earners in the villages starved. Two million to three million people died in that famine and its aftermath.

The income of the poorer part of society stayed the same, but the increase in prices caused by the expanded appetites of the newly wealthy made some of the poor worse off in the most obvious way possible - they were dead, rather than alive. Are you saying "yes, but that's the price of progress" or "This is what matters. How can you compare life and death to cellphones"? Well either way, stop now.

For some reason we spend most of our time assessing which of these changes outweighs the other rather than just admitting that both stories have some truth to them. In a technological age, inequality provides one of the driving forces for innovation that generates long-run growth. In a society where basic goods are rationed by price, inequality will put more of those basic goods out of reach of the poorer ranks of society.

I am in natural sympathy with the second story and not with the first, but I suspect both are largely true. The industrial revolution contained both these stories. Technological change and inequality-driven poverty that made many people really worse off. And as so often, EP Thompson got it right. Commenting [in The Making of the English Working Class, p232] on John Clapham's Economic History of Modern Britain he wrote "Throughout this painstaking investigation" of changes that affected field labourers at the turn of the 19th century, Clapham "eschews all generalizations except for one -- the pursuit of the mythical 'average'." "What he was really doing [with his pursuit of the average], of course, was to offer a tentative value judgement as to that elusive quality, 'well-being'... Since the judgement springs like an oak out of such a thicket of circumstantial detail -- and since it is itself discuised as an 'average' -- it is easily mistaken as a statement of fact".

Was the industrial revolution good or bad? Yes.

So how do we react to these two different stories? By refusing to let one cancel out the other. A natural conclusion of Sen's story is that scarce basic goods should stay out of the market economy (public education, public health care) as price is not a good way to ration access to such goods. And a natural conclusion of the innovation story is that the market economy has an important role when it comes to providing new goods. Neither are particularly controversial of course, but if we pursue the mythical average we end up thinking of them as being in contradiction. If the market is good for cars why not antibiotics? If price cannot be trusted to supply rice in Bengal, why can it be trusted with cellphones? It is in pursuing the mythical average that we end up with such one-dimensional statements as "markets are bad" or "government should stay out of the economy". The trick, I increasingly think, is to refuse to pursue that average.

blackberry photoblogging test

you can ignore this one too. Just trying out the BlackBerry Typepad application with a photo of our new back yard

Email Blogging test

Don't read this. I am just checking that I can email to the blog.