-Noam Chomsky
I have found that a common error in the critiques that economists proffer (especially those of the Chicago school of thought) is to hone in on small portions of concepts (tiny in fact), analyze that single point, and then dismiss the whole of an argument. Call it particularism or maybe just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I feel that way about Paul Krugman’s review of John Gray’s False Dawn.
Okay, I didn’t contribute actual Jell-O to the infosphere[^1], but weirdly enough, after reading Chris Anderson’s “The Big Lie About Free” I got to thinking that what’s really silly about all these complaints about the seeming decline in value of media is that the idea of the promotional giveaway is so old! How old, you say? Read more…
There have been a lot of technology pundits discussing the demise of the desktop—primarily arguing that the desktop is going to get sucked in to the browser. And there has been a lot of conversation about switching from the desktop to “the cloud”—the idea of the network as the computer. In a funny comment in that Wired article I just linked to, Clay Shirky is quoted as saying that when Thomas Watson estimated that the world only needed five computers, his estimate was off by four. It rings true because it is a simple and funny observation, but this new view of the network as the computer is a binary view, problematic because as software engineers still tend to do, the solution takes the user into account second and not first. A user-first outlook for most software demands of it that it be a desktop-cloud hybrid—with good reason. And a desktop-cloud hybrid won’t suck the OS in the browser, it will suck the browser into all the apps that a user has. I want to point out two real successes in this regard first, and then look at gaps in the current software offerings out there.
Brad Edmonds over at the Mises.org Blog writes that there are a few messages that we really need to garner from the bridge collapse in Minnesota. He writes that one message we should take from the collapse is that it was a rare event. He is correct. The Federal Highway Administration has the total count of bridges in the US currently at 597,340.[^1] With more than half a million bridges in the US and five years since the last collapse, we are talking about a rare event. But Edmonds then goes on to argue that this another example of the kinds of failures that occur due to the bureaucratic negligence, misplaced incentives, and all-around laziness that private markets could solve so much better for us than the government. There’s a logical problem with that argument and an important distinction that needs to made.
