Category: Web/Tech

Donald C, Lavoie, intellectual father of the econoblogosphere

by  Tyler Cowen in

Don Lavoie taught at GMU many years before he passed away in 2001.  Most of Don’s work was in comparative systems and central planning, but in the early to mid 90s he spent a few years investigating hypertext.  Don claimed that someday economics would be written in linkable, annotatable form, rather than on paper.  Economics, in his Gadamer-drenched view, would become one big giant conversation rather than a series of isolated papers.  Here is one snippet of his views.  For a few years he talking about the idea non-stop.

At the time I thought he was crazy.

What are the benefits of being full professor?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Dan Drezner, who just won the title (congratulations!), gives a list.  Oddly he leaves off the most important (only?) benefit, namely that no one can tell you any more that you won’t make full professor.  I know that sounds silly but in essence you choke off the ability of your university to send you one very particular negative status signal.  Nor can they hold that threat over your head.

Sometimes I think this is also a benefit of being married.  Let’s say you and your significant other are not married.  In that case proposing, and having that proposal turned down, often causes couples to split up.  By marrying you remove this scenario as the source of a possible split.

There are advantages to sitting at the very top and very bottom of status distributions; it is often the in-between spots that are problematic.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Megan Non-McArdle quits blogging, at least for the time being. 

I’ve long felt that the routine of married life fits the routine of blogging very well; I really do wake up the same hour each morning, more or less.  If I weren’t married I would still blog but I would feel more conflicted about it and perhaps she does too.  ("You’re funnier on the blog" one loyal (and beautiful) MR reader once told me upon meeting.)  Dating and blogging either means the blog is a secret (but for how long?) or the potential partner "dates the blog" before dating you.  Do I really want to be explaining "Markets in Everything" on a first or second date?  ("No, I don’t want you as a prostitute.  Most of the entries are sad, or satirical, but there is a secret code to indicate the ones I approve of.  For further explanation, go to the middle chapter in Montaigne’s second book of Essays.")  Maybe the blog is more charming than I am and I would do better to send it on my dates but that’s still an odd place to be.  In any case my guess is that Megan Non-McArdle is doing the right thing by quitting.  We all wish Megan Non- well in her quest for Mr. Non-McArdle, and in her quest for everything else, etc.

Back of the envelope

by  Tyler Cowen in

Is Wikipedia just the beginning?  Clay Shirky has turned off his TV and gotten down to work:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.  I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching?  Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.  Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

I thank Jules Sigall for the pointer.