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Sometimes I’m ashamed to live in a socialist country.

I’ve found it hard to have sympathy with the prescriptive camp. Of course there is a place for clear writing, and I strongly believe that well-studied punctuation, spelling, and grammar makes communication clearer at best, and even a good impression at worst. Nevertheless, prescriptive diktat is everywhere, and often with little justification. As an example, despite being British, I’m a big fan of American English – which is often ridiculed and misunderstood by many British people.

As such, I’m going to propose Ferrier’s Rule of Common Language Usage, #1:

Any describable linguistic construction used by a majority of the population should be prescribed where relevant.

(by ‘where relevant’, I’m talking about language education in schools, etc.)

I think this would greatly help language develop – it ain’t static; get over it – and make language richer and more interesting. What do you think?

For a long time, Winchester’s most obvious and best option for coffee (in my humble opinion) has been the equally sterile and characterless Caffè Nero chain. There are a few other chains and independents around, but they’re all weaker for one reason or another (low ceilings, no air-conditioning, dirty tables, etc.). Starbucks will become its most obvious competitor, located only a few doors down, and will hopefully shake things up. It’s interesting how Caffè Nero’s dominant position has allowed it to get away with some things – the lines are always far too long, and the staff slow and inefficient. I see this as a practical example to observe how change in markets works, that wouldn’t be possible in a larger city with less incumbency and more turnover of residents. It’s going to be curious to see what happens, and I’ll be one of the first in Starbucks’ door.

People with my political opinions often make arguments for the latter based on either practical or moral arguments. Richard and I had a online discussion about this recently. But maybe there’s another, more silly, question that’s missing: which is sexier: business or government? A quick look at the primary US government portal compared to Wal-Mart’s homepage leaves me in no doubt who hired the better web designer, at any rate (and Wal-Mart is hardly an example of glamour). Which corporate body makes you want to interact with them? Anybody who’s spent any time at a UK local council, with their cuppa-and-rich-tea-biscuit image, will know what I mean (that’s an example of non-sexiness, if it’s not clear: not that I have anything against rich tea).

I’m semi-serious, actually – this does matter – it’s an issue of marketing. Clearly a company cannot actually be sexy – only people can be that. But the Virgin family of companies gets pretty close – and not just because of the suggestive naming. It’s an image that has been carefully cultivated by the folk at Virgin. Virgin is a company that you want to like (well, I do, anyway), irrespective of the fact that their trains don’t run on time.

I think the reasoning behind this is simple. Companies have to be sexy – or at least, they have to project an image which is aligned with values their customers want them to have. Sometimes this is sexiness – and Virgin is a prime example of a brand that’s attacked several markets with that technique and won some new custom. Sometimes, to be fair, there’s another image to be conveyed (UPS brown vans and brown uniforms are not alluring; but they do project an image of reliability). Conversely, government has no such motivation to project an image of anything – or at least the vast majority of unelected officials don’t. There’s no requirement to improve, no motivation to act like a marketer, because there’s no competition. Thus, government will always continue to project an image of dull and incompetent, whether that be the case or not. As Seth says, ‘[people] lose their jobs because of boring marketing’ – except in government they don’t, because they rarely lose them at all.

It’s probably not the most pressing problem the world faces right now, but wouldn’t it be nice to stop worrying about global warming for five minutes and think about how to make the institutions we deal with on a daily basis more appealing?

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

Milton’s son David is also an economist, and continues to promote his ideas on this blog. The Economist has also drawn up an interesting selection of quotes discussing Friedman.

Note: Milton Friedman is unrelated to Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, a book which Roo Reynolds wrote a partial review of recently.

I suspect I’m not the only one suffering from this decreased attention span, but the question is – is there anything we should do about it? Insofar as lots of shorter information diverts people from a few bits of longer information (reading 100/articles/week, say, rather than 2 books/week), it probably indicates that we simply don’t get as much value or entertainment from the longer stuff as we thought we did (or should). This is called revealed preference – what you prefer is shown by your actions, not by your words. So I suspect the simple answer is no.

Seth Godin certainly seems to agree with part of this theory – he has a theory that books, in many cases, have now become a ‘takeaway’ for shorter essays and other written pieces. I don’t think it’s fair to go as far as to say that they are simply fluff, but Seth nevertheless makes a good point – that many books simply expand on shorter ideas – and it is questionable, sometimes, what the marginal value of that is over consuming something completely different (everything you do has a time-driven opportunity cost).

The problem, of course, is that building up habits like this may make it harder to concentrate for sustained periods of time on reading/viewing/listening when that is necessary.

I’m interested in what your experiences are – do you suffer from decreased attention span? Is it a result of increased volumes of information, or do you think it’s something different?

Bjorn is an economist (my favourite type of -mist) and I know this doesn’t bode well for the acceptance of this theory: primarily because economics has never done a very good job of publicising what it’s about, and so there’s a frequent misconception that it’s something to do with money. The typical reaction to the conclusion above is that economists only are only looking at the monetary side of things. Well, yes, that’s true, but it’s also the whole point. Economists put prices and costs on all kinds of things that many people don’t (life or death, polluted air, a loving relationship, etc.). Of course one can argue until the cows come home about the what those prices and costs are: and everyone does (even when they aren’t quoting them in dollars or pounds). But the money is only used as a number, as a symbol.

If we were to try and rank which we wanted more, an orange or an apple, we could probably do that. In fact, we could probably say how much more we wanted one than the other (twice as much – give me two apples, and I’ll exchange you an orange). Introduce a banana and the decision becomes more complex, but the principle doesn’t. This is all prices are – a way to trade off one alternative against another and allocate resources (which is similar to the definition of economics you’ll find in any textbook).

This is why it isn’t really callous to rank the world’s big problems and say that maybe climate change doesn’t deserve so much attention. At the end of the day, the world only seems prepared to spend so much time and money solving problems. Doesn’t it make sense to solve the ones that gives humanity the greatest degree of progress, health and prosperity?

However, the upside is often overlooked. Travel is pleasurable. Some of the best experiences in my life have involved travelling, and I’m far from the only one. Quality of life does have value. Perhaps even more importantly, transport enables you to get stuff more cheaply. Trade is mostly beneficial, and the wider the scope of a market, the more beneficial it is (because of the greater likelihood that you’ll find large extremes of want and produce a large profit). Fast, cheap, reliable transport increases the efficiency of markets and is good for humankind.

Don’t feel bad next time you hop on a jet, and please don’t waste your money on offsetting carbon. Recycling is a whole ‘nother story.

Easy Rider presents the world as suits it best: there’s no suburban American, just little towns and vast expanses of beautiful and wild desert. The visuals are perfectly offset by classic American music – country and rock ‘n’ roll – and even the editor seems to be high at times, with wild cuts and babbled scenes.

There is a back story to Easy Rider, and it has some good themes: freedom being one. For liberals such as myself, it’s a particularly chilling illustration of how conservative America isn’t as free as it thinks it is: Jack Nicholson hits the nail on the head in his central speech of the film:

Billy (Denis Hopper): What the hell’s wrong with freedom, man? That’s what it’s all about.
George (Jack Nicholson): Oh yeah, that’s right, that’s what it’s all about, all right. But talkin’ about it and bein’ it – that’s two different things. I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. ‘Course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ‘em.

Ultimately, though, watching Easy Rider as social commentary is probably going to result in disappointment: there are more intelligent alternatives. The best way to enjoy this film is just to chill out and let it flow (and I wouldn’t care to suggest you how do that). Peace, man.

Clay Shirky, in his essay A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy (also included in the same volume; the online copy is edited slightly differently from the printed one), notes how online (synchronous) discussions frequently descend into talk about sex – and that sexual banter is much more common in synchronous communication than asynchronous (how often have you flirted with someone over the phone compared to email? – please, no anecdotes in the comments section). I’m not a psychologist, but I assume that this has something to do with it being hard to retain the thrill of adult banter over the course of a (potentially lengthy) asynchronous discussion. The same arguments probably apply in a less dramatic fashion to non-sexual communication.

There’s a related observation to be made about the perceived economics of people’s time. In general, most folks implicitly value synchronous time as higher than asynchronous – if I ask advice of a mentor over a half-hour coffee, I feel more indebted to him than if he spends half an hour hour answering my email. I suspect the reasons are a combination of my having accurate information (I know exactly how long he spent drinking the coffee), the start-up and tear-down time (he actually took 5 minutes to get to the coffee shop), and knowing that I have his undivided attention (he wasn’t multi-tasking). Nevertheless, we still continue to rate synchronous time more highly than its opportunity costs compared to asynchronous time.

To relate the two assertions, wouldn’t you rather spend half an hour in person with your spouse / significant other / other politically correct phrase than an hour writing and exchanging emails with them? Synchronous communication has a strange attraction than its poor cousin doesn’t – despite all of asynchronicity’s time-shifting advantages. This is going to be a big challenge for a multi-time-zone world.

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.

Update: The New York Times has a detailed story and biography.

‘What’s sex?’ – Betty

Pleasantville is a favourite film of mine. Powerful on many levels, it manages to captivate the attention as well as entertain and give pause for thought.

The premise is simple; David (Tobey Maguire) is given a remote control that allows him to enter the TV set and the programme of Pleasantville with his sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon). This mysterious start to the film is a well-trod one (Gremlins and Back to the Future being well-known previous examples), but it works without too much tedium. The world of Pleasantville that they enter is a black and white sitcom set in the 50s with bland, inoffensive content. David loves this programme, but, egged on by his sister’s behaviour in having sex with one of the town’s other teenagers (in a place where holding hands is risqué), he soon begins to encourage the townspeople to rebel and investigate their adventurous side. Apparently too much sex means poor quality basketball the next morning, but as each townsperson’s innocence is challenged, the town begins to turn from black and white to colour, piece by piece, in a most beautiful manner, as they realise their greater potential.

The film is a superb parody of conservative social values: everything the townspeople hold dear is challenged by David and the growing band of ‘coloreds’. There’s more than a nod towards the segregation in America of that period, with a separation of the coloreds from the non-coloreds as the more conservative folk (led by mayor Big Bob – played the always excellent J.T. Walsh – sadly his last film) try to resist the growing awareness of beauty and variety. There are some truly touching scenes, such as where Bill Johnson (Jeff Daniels) sees an art book for the first time – his reaction looks like Newton‘s would if you showed him a 747. The film also investigates Pavlovian response, as George (William H. Macy) highlights in a humourous scene where he seems incapable of understanding why his dinner is not on the table.

Ultimately Pleasantville is not only great fun, and funny to boot, it’s also deep, meaningful, and has a happy ending. What more could you want? This is a film to be enjoyed.

An Econtalk podcast on the subject of religion a few weeks ago was the first I haven’t fully enjoyed. Larry Iannacone, the guest that week, outlined a theory he has spent many years developing: the amount of religious participation in a market (e.g. a country) is correlated with the amount of religious freedom permitted. He alleged that the USA was a good example – somewhere that had constitutionally guaranteed religious freedom, and subsequently widespread religious belief. This argument has intuitive power (when people are more free to do stuff their own way, they are more likely to take part in it), and seems empirically justified too (I didn’t spend long on the ARDA website he linked to, which contains more statistics on this than one can shake a stick at).

However, Iannacone went on to say some things about average education levels of religious folk vs. non-religious folk that, as an agnostic atheist, made me rather uncomfortable. He didn’t really discuss how these education levels were measured, or how, if at all, they might be biased towards religion. Further digs at Ayn Rand (I’m not an objectivist, but I am a libertarian) seemed a bit below the belt.

This isn’t to say that Iannacone’s statistics seemed implausible; quite the opposite. If anything, they are a good illustration of how economics can sometimes clue us in on the truths we don’t really want to hear. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel a little more comfortable when I saw the case for the defence (admittedly without the economic content) presented by Richard Dawkins a few days later in The Root of All Evil – which is worth seeing, even if the arguments are a little simplistic.

Nevertheless, Second Life is in a dangerous period. The early adopters are familiar with it now, and there some important challenges to be overcome if it is to break into the mainstream:

• It needs to shake off the geeky image, as Google, Wikipedia, and others have done before. This is essential for mass sign-up. There is a huge group who will equate it with MMORPGs such as the famous World of Warcraft, and an even larger one who simply aren’t aware of its existence.
• It needs to become more robust. The demands Second Life makes on one’s machine are significant, which currently denies a huge potential market, and the client and world in general are not particularly stable – frequent updates and glitches will not be tolerated by most folks. The only way this seems likely to happen in practice is to slow the world’s technology changes for a while so they are further behind the hardware development curve.
• Second Life is a lot like the house that Wikipedia built; great from 30,000 feet, but rough round the edges when you zoom in. Left-overs from experiments are everywhere, and the world itself lacks coherency. I’m not convinced this is necessarily harmful by itself, but it is a problem that needs addressing to avoid frustrating impatient later adopters. Wikipedia has done a good job of starting to fix this with voluntary task forces attacking accuracy problems and polishing the edges. Second Life probably needs the same.
• Most of all, Second Life needs to decide what it is for. This isn’t to say that Linden Lab needs to do this (although they’d do well to encourage it if they want to stay in business), but somebody sure does. I’ve seen Second Life used for meetings, lectures, classes and similar functions, but other use cases seem to have so far evaded it. I’m sure there must be some more innovative stuff to come; Second Life is, after all, a brand new interface to manipulate data with. Yes, OK, it’s not the first 3D interface by a long shot, but it is the first with such a vast user base and such a high degree of customisability.

Many folks propose that Second Life is merely a ‘taster’ – the Yahoo of virtual worlds – and that the Google is still to arrive. Others foresee a gloomier future. I hope that isn’t the case – I want to like virtual universes, I really do. But like most people, I want to use it for something constructive – a half-way house between a communication tool and a game is no fun. Please, Second Lifers, invent a value proposition.

Update 2006-12-13: Clay Shirky’s analysis of Second Life is spot on.

For example, let’s say that the hair on our heads grew not at the rate it does now – approximately 0.5mm/day – but at 1m/day. It seems clear that hairdressers, as least as they are currently organised, wouldn’t be able to keep up. Either we’d need hairdressers to be everywhere and very efficient, or, more likely, we’d need some form of automated haircutting machine – perhaps with one installed in every bathroom. Brides-to-be would struggle to look just-so at the right moment, so there’d need to be an emergency hairdresser on standby.

Another example, perhaps even more far-fetched, but nevertheless pertinent – what if rubbish expanded in volume in an unbounded way after being disposed of – at a modest rate of, say, 10% a year? We’d already have had to have found a way of either vastly cutting down on rubbish disposal or offloading it to other planets – or perhaps, more sinister, cutting down on the population generating it.

Both of the above scenarios are clearly nonsense given our current understanding of science, but they help in jogging the brain into thinking in a more open-minded mode, and they clarify the consequences of our actions (although rubbish doesn’t expand, we are using more landfill space every year – the scenario merely amplifies the logical conclusion).

Here’s some more to try:

• The average air temperature at ground level in temperate areas is -50°C.
• Most insects are fatally dangerous to humans, and almost impossible to vaccinate against.
• Water cannot be frozen artificially.
• Paper decays within 2 months.

Is this a new technique? I’ve never come across it anywhere.

Chevy seems to be upping the ante with a controversial new advert for their Silverado truck – with an admittedly catchy tune (video; I’m not sure what Stephen Colbert has to do with it). A recent Slate podcast deconstructs this in detail; suffice to say that images of Katrina and Vietnam are hardly likely to avoid heated discussion. A slightly blunt and clumsy parody is already doing the rounds.

This is all particularly interesting at a time when alternatives to petrol-guzzling SUVs finally seem to be becoming viable. David (site down at the time of writing) recently discussed an In Business podcast that looked at the Tesla Roadster, the first electric car that seems to actually have both a realistic marketing and engineering story. Tesla claim a 135 mpg equivalent energy consumption and 0-60mph in 4 seconds: not a bad combination. The car is currently being marketed only in California due to EU regulatory problems (please, government, get out of the way of the entrepreneurs saving the world). But it looks like it might finally herald the start of a more sustainable future.

I don’t think it’s an unreasonable prediction to say that the car industry will be one to watch closely over the next decade.

Has anyone else noticed that the word ‘expert’ is changing its meaning, becoming more generous? It seems like the bar for becoming an ‘expert’ is lower than it once was (good examples can be found on the 6 o’clock news). Of course it’s hard to measure this other than empirically, but it’s fun to play the mental exercise – are you an expert in anything? I’m going to assert arbitrarily that unless you know more about a subject than 95% of the people who are in some way experienced in the field in question (by the most narrow definition feasible), then you’re not an expert. I think this approximates to the definition of ‘expert’ most people used to have, but not any more (I’d postulate the figure is now drifting in the 60% region). My strict definition of ‘expert’ means I’m not one in economics, film, libertarianism, SOA, or a variety of other fields I’m interested in. I don’t find this depressing, though – I think it just makes the word more useful. A vague definition is the enemy of precise language (something Strunk and White advocated). Unfortunately, most dictionaries are vague on expert, only hinting towards a ‘high degree of skill’. This is why I felt it might be better to put numbers on it (even if the domain can still be vague).

I’d be interested to hear your empirical observations.