a robot, i am not

Chris Anderson’s Free is Gee Whiz economics

jritch — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:42:05 +0000

The time you put into reading this isn't free

Chris Anderson’s follow up to his revolutionary The Long Tail (2006, Hyperion) has me reminded of Thomas Friedman for geeks. Stuff that people younger than 25 get naturally but that CEOs and VCs can read and say, “wow, that internets is so amazing!”

Free (2009, Hyperion) sets out to cover new ground in describing the economics of Free but ends up merely relaying interesting case studies and taking a “Gee Whiz” approach to the topic. Anderson states early in the book, “An economy had emerged around Free before the economic model that could describe it” (p.4) And that’s why I’m so disappointed. The Free economy has been well established for the entirety of human history through indigenous societies before Chris Anderson put it all into this singular book. That’s not to say the book isn’t entertaining or that it isn’t a valuable place to read about the history of Free, merely that Anderson’s brillance which shined through in The Long Tail fails to show up in Free with any groundbreaking predictions or observations.

I learned a few things from this book, “the annual deflation rate of the digital world is 50%” (p. 13) and that King Gilette could sell so many razors because he was willing to give them away. However, from one King to another, Anderson is completely oblivious (as are most neo-classical economists) to the role of energy in the economy. M. King Hubbert’s theory of peak oil production fails to get a single mention and that’s surprising given that the economy derived from cheap oil is the operating system enabling our ability to trade privacy for the Google server farms that eat massive loads of energy to provide us with free word processing and email storage. Anderson devotes almost two whole pages to the environmental cost of Free (p.226) by addressing the Tragedy of the Commons and stating that “simple economics” has the ability to incorporate the negative externalities ensuring that, “wasting bits will not have the environmental cost of wasting atoms .” The digital economics that Anderson spells out can only last as long as we have inexpensive oil and natural gas running the entire infrastructure of globalization. Semiconductors might represent the triumph of brains over brawn or the, “overthrow of matter in the economy.” (p.83) but if we don’t have the energy to mine coal or buy a barrel of oil for less than $150 USD then I’m sure we’ll be concerned with many other investment strategies than talking about a post-scarcity economy online.

I received the greatest excitement out of this book when Anderson began addressing Lewis Hyde’s concept of the Gift Economy (p.183) and applying it to interactions on the web. We do a lot of the things we do online because it allows us to contribute in a meaningful way to a community, since all our real-world communities have died in the throes of suburban isolation and dispassionate consumerism. However, many of the actions Anderson assigns to a Gift Economy, like the writing of Amazon and IMDB reviews could equally be chalked up to ego. So I would recommend that you read Free if you’ve got the time, but time isn’t free.

on India

jritch — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:01:08 +0000

From Lord Macaulay’s speech in the British Parliament on 2nd Feb 1835:

“I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

Contrast the vision of prosperity in India to the modern India infiltrated by the Western school system where poor rice farmers commit suicide because of failed GM crop yields and very summoning of ‘India’ catalyzes visions of desolated soil and absolute poverty. (I mean except for all the call centers right?) Cheerleaders for exploitation like Tom Friedman champion the entry of nations like India and China into the modern system of globalism, however, those countries can never reach our level of prosperity because we used up all the net energy on the way to the top. They have to play our game because we’ve forced it on them. Their sustainable farming culture of centuries must change into materialist consumerism because we’ve decimated possibilities for their lifestyle to continue.

I just felt like posting this quote because it is an excellent example of how international development through the IMF started because its really no more than modern slavery at the behest of corporate interest in developed nations.

Understanding the motivations of the architects of the modern world reveals a startling picture of greed, callousness and ignorance. Lord Macaulay provides a record of those merits.

[quote above via The Oil Drum]

go white blood cell!

jritch — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:13:30 +0000

This video shows a neutrophil (a type of white blood cell) chasing a staphylococcus aureus bacterium. The video was recorded by biochemistry professor David Rogers of Vanderbilt University in the 1950s.

[via Neatorama]

the latest on peak oil

jritch — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:53:19 +0000

Today I was listening to this great rundown of the global oil supply situation on the Financial Sense Newshour with guest Jeffrey Brown VP of Global Oil Supply Analysis for Logi Energy (featured on the first 48 mins of this audio track.

Some key facts I learned from the podcast and elsewhere:

25% of the worlds oil comes from 25 oil fields
the rate of field collapse is increasing
Mexico’s Cantarell field went from 2.2mbd in 2001 to 722,000bpd in 2009 (yikes!)

Essentially the take away from this podcast was that the rate of depletion will be determined by how fast developing nations continue to grow. Seems straightforward enough but its just a way of saying that no one really knows how fast we’ll run out of oil which can be supplied to developed nations. However, it seems that with current field collapse rates the optimistic date of 2020 for a peak will likely be moved closer to our current time if we haven’t passed it by already.

what I struggle with when I consider a career in clean energy technologies…

jritch — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:38:59 +0000

…is Jevons’ Paradox.

From a recent post on The Oil Drum,

In his 1865 book “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines,” English economist William Stanley Jevons made the observation “Of the Economy of Fuel” that when improvements in technology make it possible to use a fuel more efficiently, the consumption of the fuel tends to go up, not down.

This is known as Jevons’ Paradox. It occurs because as the efficiency of a type of machinery is improved, it becomes profitable for many more customers and feasible to apply it to new applications. This results in rapid growth of the number of machines in use and consequently, an increase in fuel consumption overall.

Should I devote the next half-decade of my life to obtaining a PhD in this field simply to attempt to drive the cycle further? When society doesn’t provide incentives for low energy tech development, how can we make sustainable advances?

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Post tags: energy, net energy, peak oil, sustainability

magnetism!

jritch — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:23:29 +0000

I don’t post about science nearly enough, especially since I’m training to be a scientist. Art and physics meet in this awesome video of the space science laboratory in Berkley,

the real-life Avatar

jritch — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:00:35 +0000

It was obvious the James Cameron’s latest blockbuster lacked originality but a far more spectacular (but less 3D) story occurred in Papua New Guinea. The Coconut Revolution details the world’s first eco-revolution where indigenous peoples successfully fought off the combined might of a giant multi-national mining corporation, paid mercenaries and two governments’ militaries. Awesome stuff.

Here’s a short 5 min. excerpt which I’ve watched,

And here’s the full thing (52 mins) which I have yet to watch,

Kenneth Boulding’s Three Laws of the Dismal Science

jritch — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:55:42 +0000

I consider myself a highly optimistic person, so I like to temper my optimism by reading through economist Kenneth Boulding’s three laws from time to time. Boulding once said, “Anyone who thinks that steady growth can continue indefinitely, is either a madman or an economist.”

First Theorem: “The Dismal Theorem” If the only ultimate check on the growth of population is misery, then the population will grow until it is miserable enough to stop its growth.

Second Theorem: “The Utterly Dismal Theorem” This theorem states that any technical improvement can only relieve misery for a while, for so long as misery is the only check on population, the [technical] improvement will enable population to grow, and will soon enable more people to live in misery than before. The final result of [technical] improvements, therefore, is to increase the equilibrium population which is to increase the total sum of human misery.

Third Theorem: “The moderately cheerful form of the Dismal Theorem” Fortunately, it is not too difficult to restate the Dismal Theorem in a moderately cheerful form, which states that if something else, other than misery and starvation, can be found which will keep a prosperous population in check, the population does not have to grow until it is miserable and starves, and it can be stably prosperous. Until we know more, the Cheerful Theorem remains a question mark. Misery we know will do the trick.

Eric Sevareid’s Law acts as a corollary – The Chief Cause of Problems is Solutions

(via Miguel Barbosa’s interview of Albert Bartlett)

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Post tags: economic growth, economics, humanity

tracking my sleep with YawnLog

jritch — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:00:02 +0000

I’m a big fan of personal metrics and tracking tools. Recently I discovered YawnLog and have been using it to mark my bedtime and wake-up every day. My goal is to get 7.5 hours of sleep every night but YawnLog only supports setting goals at full integer hour numbers, so I have to choose 7 or 8. I’m interested to see if there are any patterns which emerge after I do this for a few months. Already, I noticed a huge sleep surplus the days before I started to feel under the weather, perhaps my body adjusting to the oncoming virus I had for two days. If I can get better at noticing patterns in my sleep I’ll learn a lot about myself in combination with my dream journal.

Through Self-Hypnosis techniques I learned from Adam Eason’s book many years ago, I’ve been able to wake up with out alarms for quite some time in most scenarios. I’ll be interested to see if I can meet my target of 7.5 hours in bed or if my body likes to meet a different quota for sleep.

tracking my sleeps with YawnLog

why we consume alcohol

jritch — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:00:27 +0000

This is definitely the most brilliant economics paper I’ve read in a while.

First the abstract,

It is argued that drug consumption, most commonly alcohol drinking, can be a technology to give up some control over one’s actions and words. It can be employed by
trustworthy players to reveal their type. Similarly alcohol can function as a “social lubricant” and faciliate type revelation in conversations. It is shown that both separating and pooling equilibria can exist; as opposed to the classic results in the literature, a pooling equilibrium is still informative. Drugs which allow a gradual loss of control by appropriate doses and for which moderate consumption is not addictive are particularly suitable because the consumption can be easily observed and reciprocated and is unlikely to occur out of the social context. There is a tradeoff between the efficiency gains due to the signaling effect and the loss of productivity associated with intoxication. Long run evolutionary equilibria of the type distribution are considered. If coordination on an exclusive technology is efficient, social norms or laws can raise efficiency by legalizing only one drug.

And my favorite line from the paper:

If alcohol can be used to give others better information about one’s personality, the social consumption of alcohol can benefit those who would like to honestly reveal their type.

(via Tyler Cowen)

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Post tags: behavioral economy, economics, humanity