Simple -- it would give away my age to the under-25 year-old sugar babies.
Source: "Teens Don't Tweet" (Nielsen Wire).
I recall not long ago when one of my undergrad chick friends left a Facebook status update saying, "what is this twitter all about? i don't get it." All of her friends left similar responses about how pointless it is -- and one may have even mentioned that it was for old people, although I could be imagining that part. Of course, Twitter's pointlessness was not the reason they weren't into it -- hell, they post pointless status updates on Facebook several times a day. But they sensed somehow that it wasn't cool young people doing it, but rather the "mom from Mean Girls" crowd. Young people's social antennae are hyper-sensitive, so don't try to put anything past them.
August 8, 2009
August 7, 2009
Economic lessons of video games
The ravages of a certain sexy academic trend in economics, and its enthusiastic application in the business world, could have been easily avoided if the people involved had only looked to the world of video games, which would have handily disproved their silly little theories. I'm referring to the academic school of thought that believes in the lock-in of inferior technologies due to network effects -- even though any evidence for them is lacking. The application to the management culture was to sacrifice just about everything, including quality, to gain the all-important "first mover advantage" -- even though any evidence for this advantage is lacking.
Primarily academics and other smarties did not grasp how implausible these ideas were, and did not accept the evidence showing so, because they sprang from one of the unofficial religions among nerds -- hating on Microsoft. Every tribe needs its devil, and sub-billionaire nerds will always use Microsoft and Bill Gates for this purporse. Really, much of the seemingly unrelated pieces of their worldview and codified behavior patterns derive from a gut aversion to Microsoft. In reality, Microsoft dominated the markets that it has because its products are consistently rated as better than the others. Read Winners, Losers, and Microsoft (featured in my Amazon box above) for more data, or visit Stan Liebowitz's webpage.
Realizing that they will never snap out of this, I've thought of what other types of evidence we could show them that would not offend their religious sensibilities. It so happens that if we use examples from the hardware and software of video games rather than personal computers, they would recognize right away what the evidence shows, and would at least tone down their ranting about the spread of inferior Microsoft products.
The key idea behind inferior lock-in due to network effects is that adopters of a technology consider not only its utility to the adopter, but also the benefit the user gets from being part of the network of adopters. For example, you should buy something that plays VHS tapes rather than Betamax tapes if the former has a larger installed user base -- say, because you figure that producers of tapes will offer a wider variety in the format that's more common. The worry is that this network effect could overwhelm the intrinsic quality effect, so that an inferior technology became (nearly) fixed just because it got the snowball rolling in its direction early on.
For the same reason, real-life managers fought hard to get the "first mover advantage" during the tech bubble because they believed this theory. After all, if it was possible for an allegedly inferior keyboard design to become the standard, or an allegedly inferior videotape format to become standard, due to network effects, we shouldn't worry so much about quality that we sit on our asses and somebody else beats us to getting the snowball rolling. Get to the market first, and while it may not be a lock, we've at least got the positive feedback loop of network effects started for us.
Again, all of this was nonsense, but it was hard for the proponents to see because it validated their geek tastes for exotic keyboard and videotape formats, making them feel superior. But take another geek hobby like playing video games. The near impossibility of dethroning an entrenched incumbent would have meant that Atari would have reigned through the 8-bit era, leveraging its dominant market share and huge installed user base from the previous era of video games. Instead, the Atari 7800 went nowhere, while Nintendo -- who before had not even produced a home console at all -- readily swept them aside.
What led to this no-name newcomer stealing Atari's thunder? -- quite simply, the games for the Nintendo were better than for the Atari 7800. There are surely ratings data from the late 1980s that would support this claim, but this isn't a data-mining blog anymore, so I'll put that confirmation exercise aside for the moment.
Nintendo continued to dominate through the 16-bit era, so now we have another test of the lock-in due to network effects idea -- namely, that they would continue to do so into the next generation. But that didn't happen at all. Once more, a complete newcomer -- Sony -- easily tossed Nintendo off a cliff when it released its PlayStation, whose games appealed to people more than did the games for the Nintendo64. As Nintendo had before, Sony continued to dominate the following generation of consoles with its PlayStation 2.
So, Sony's locked in their consoles for good, right? Wrong -- in the current generation of home consoles, Sony's PlayStation 3 is in a distant third place among the big three, while Nintendo has completely reversed its beat-down years and come out on top with its Wii.
I could surely go on, but the point is that it was as clear as day that lock-in (whether of inferior or superior products) due to network effects was a silly idea, just looking at video games. Instead, it was the hardware that offered the best software that sold the most units -- sometimes it was the incumbent company (Super Nintendo, PS2), sometimes just the opposite (NES, PS1, Wii). This allows a complete virgin in the video game business to utterly annihilate the reigning giant, as Nintendo did with Atari, Sony did with Nintendo, and now Nintendo has done with Sony in turn.
The first mover advantage was equally obviously illusory, even during the tech bubble of roughly 10 years ago. Take the CD-ROM format for games -- it looked like this was the future, rather than the ROM cartridges that the Nintendo or Sega Genesis used. According to the first mover advantage idea, the first -- or at least one of the very first -- systems to use CD-ROMs should have become the standard. However, it wasn't until the PlayStation (released in 1995) that a system using CDs really took off.
Was the PlayStation the first mover into the CD-based console market? Not by a long shot. Fully three years earlier, Sega released the Sega CD attachment to the Genesis. So, not only did the Sega CD have such a huge lead in launching, but they could tap into the huge installed user base that Sega had built with the Genesis, whereas Sony had no fans to work with, as they had no previous system. But again, everyone thought the games for the Sega CD sucked, so it went nowhere.
Even before that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s NEC released a CD-ROM attachment for their TurboGrafx-16 system, as well as a combined cartridge-cum-CD-ROM system. Also, the Neo Geo CD debuted in 1994, the 3DO in 1993, and the Philips CD-i in 1991. Once again, there weren't enough superstar games to draw people into buying these CD-based systems.
Or we could look at what are called generations of video game consoles -- did the first entrant win? The Super Nintendo came out years after Sega Genesis and the TurboGrafx-16. The Sega Saturn came out four months before the PlayStation but got destroyed by it. In the next generation, Sega's Dreamcast enjoyed more than a one-year lead over the PlayStation 2, and a two-year lead over Nintendo's GameCube, although it too was quickly eclipsed by both of them. In the current competition, Microsoft's Xbox 360 should have benefited from its one-year lead over the Wii, but instead it has been leapfrogged by the Wii.
In all of these cases, the reason that the first mover advantage failed to materialize is that there is no such thing in the first place. Consoles sell based on how appealing its games are to the target audience, period. So it didn't matter that the Sega Saturn came out before the PlayStation -- it didn't as attractive of a library of games, so consumers steered clear of it. Product quality matters, not when you enter the market.
Finally, what if a company were not merely the first mover but the only mover -- in the fantasy world of geeks who lament the spread of QWERTY keyboards and Microsoft software, this would surely mean the company would have a lock on the market and in short order establish a monopoly, fleecing the powerless consumers. Rewind to the mid-1990s when everyone figured virtual reality was the future of video game-like experiences. Its hype extended to popular movies and music videos, its intrinsic appeal is easy enough to grasp, so the demand for a virtual reality toy was certainly there. Maybe it wouldn't be as cool as what the military used, but it would still be cool, and you get what you pay for.
Against this background of massive hype for virtual reality, Nintendo released the Virtual Boy in 1995, which offered something of a VR experience. Again, not the most high-tech thing you'd ever seen, but if you wanted virtual reality, it was the only game in town, and it wasn't even expensive at $180. However, the games for it were awful, and instead of passively giving in to a piece of shit technology, consumers refused to buy it -- and therefore, any virtual reality system -- altogether. Imagine it: no competition at all, plus the first mover advantage, plus benefiting from the virtual reality craze of the time -- and yet, this was Nintendo's most pathetic selling system of all, and it was discontinued the year after its release. This result is the exact opposite of what we'd expect if the inferior lock-in and first mover advantage ideas held any water at all.
It could be that the mostly Baby Boomer academics and managers who ran with these nutty ideas couldn't have drawn on video game evidence first-hand. But now that most nerds and managers are Generation X or younger, it should be much easier to offer evidence that they won't reject. They'll probably carve the universe in two, as most religions do -- the laws of supply and demand, and so on, apply to video games, sure, but anything related to Microsoft is described by inferior lock-in, bla bla bla, because they are the devil, not a real-life company like Nintendo or Sony. But as long as manage to chip away at the religions of academia and the managerial elite, it's worth it.
Primarily academics and other smarties did not grasp how implausible these ideas were, and did not accept the evidence showing so, because they sprang from one of the unofficial religions among nerds -- hating on Microsoft. Every tribe needs its devil, and sub-billionaire nerds will always use Microsoft and Bill Gates for this purporse. Really, much of the seemingly unrelated pieces of their worldview and codified behavior patterns derive from a gut aversion to Microsoft. In reality, Microsoft dominated the markets that it has because its products are consistently rated as better than the others. Read Winners, Losers, and Microsoft (featured in my Amazon box above) for more data, or visit Stan Liebowitz's webpage.
Realizing that they will never snap out of this, I've thought of what other types of evidence we could show them that would not offend their religious sensibilities. It so happens that if we use examples from the hardware and software of video games rather than personal computers, they would recognize right away what the evidence shows, and would at least tone down their ranting about the spread of inferior Microsoft products.
The key idea behind inferior lock-in due to network effects is that adopters of a technology consider not only its utility to the adopter, but also the benefit the user gets from being part of the network of adopters. For example, you should buy something that plays VHS tapes rather than Betamax tapes if the former has a larger installed user base -- say, because you figure that producers of tapes will offer a wider variety in the format that's more common. The worry is that this network effect could overwhelm the intrinsic quality effect, so that an inferior technology became (nearly) fixed just because it got the snowball rolling in its direction early on.
For the same reason, real-life managers fought hard to get the "first mover advantage" during the tech bubble because they believed this theory. After all, if it was possible for an allegedly inferior keyboard design to become the standard, or an allegedly inferior videotape format to become standard, due to network effects, we shouldn't worry so much about quality that we sit on our asses and somebody else beats us to getting the snowball rolling. Get to the market first, and while it may not be a lock, we've at least got the positive feedback loop of network effects started for us.
Again, all of this was nonsense, but it was hard for the proponents to see because it validated their geek tastes for exotic keyboard and videotape formats, making them feel superior. But take another geek hobby like playing video games. The near impossibility of dethroning an entrenched incumbent would have meant that Atari would have reigned through the 8-bit era, leveraging its dominant market share and huge installed user base from the previous era of video games. Instead, the Atari 7800 went nowhere, while Nintendo -- who before had not even produced a home console at all -- readily swept them aside.
What led to this no-name newcomer stealing Atari's thunder? -- quite simply, the games for the Nintendo were better than for the Atari 7800. There are surely ratings data from the late 1980s that would support this claim, but this isn't a data-mining blog anymore, so I'll put that confirmation exercise aside for the moment.
Nintendo continued to dominate through the 16-bit era, so now we have another test of the lock-in due to network effects idea -- namely, that they would continue to do so into the next generation. But that didn't happen at all. Once more, a complete newcomer -- Sony -- easily tossed Nintendo off a cliff when it released its PlayStation, whose games appealed to people more than did the games for the Nintendo64. As Nintendo had before, Sony continued to dominate the following generation of consoles with its PlayStation 2.
So, Sony's locked in their consoles for good, right? Wrong -- in the current generation of home consoles, Sony's PlayStation 3 is in a distant third place among the big three, while Nintendo has completely reversed its beat-down years and come out on top with its Wii.
I could surely go on, but the point is that it was as clear as day that lock-in (whether of inferior or superior products) due to network effects was a silly idea, just looking at video games. Instead, it was the hardware that offered the best software that sold the most units -- sometimes it was the incumbent company (Super Nintendo, PS2), sometimes just the opposite (NES, PS1, Wii). This allows a complete virgin in the video game business to utterly annihilate the reigning giant, as Nintendo did with Atari, Sony did with Nintendo, and now Nintendo has done with Sony in turn.
The first mover advantage was equally obviously illusory, even during the tech bubble of roughly 10 years ago. Take the CD-ROM format for games -- it looked like this was the future, rather than the ROM cartridges that the Nintendo or Sega Genesis used. According to the first mover advantage idea, the first -- or at least one of the very first -- systems to use CD-ROMs should have become the standard. However, it wasn't until the PlayStation (released in 1995) that a system using CDs really took off.
Was the PlayStation the first mover into the CD-based console market? Not by a long shot. Fully three years earlier, Sega released the Sega CD attachment to the Genesis. So, not only did the Sega CD have such a huge lead in launching, but they could tap into the huge installed user base that Sega had built with the Genesis, whereas Sony had no fans to work with, as they had no previous system. But again, everyone thought the games for the Sega CD sucked, so it went nowhere.
Even before that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s NEC released a CD-ROM attachment for their TurboGrafx-16 system, as well as a combined cartridge-cum-CD-ROM system. Also, the Neo Geo CD debuted in 1994, the 3DO in 1993, and the Philips CD-i in 1991. Once again, there weren't enough superstar games to draw people into buying these CD-based systems.
Or we could look at what are called generations of video game consoles -- did the first entrant win? The Super Nintendo came out years after Sega Genesis and the TurboGrafx-16. The Sega Saturn came out four months before the PlayStation but got destroyed by it. In the next generation, Sega's Dreamcast enjoyed more than a one-year lead over the PlayStation 2, and a two-year lead over Nintendo's GameCube, although it too was quickly eclipsed by both of them. In the current competition, Microsoft's Xbox 360 should have benefited from its one-year lead over the Wii, but instead it has been leapfrogged by the Wii.
In all of these cases, the reason that the first mover advantage failed to materialize is that there is no such thing in the first place. Consoles sell based on how appealing its games are to the target audience, period. So it didn't matter that the Sega Saturn came out before the PlayStation -- it didn't as attractive of a library of games, so consumers steered clear of it. Product quality matters, not when you enter the market.
Finally, what if a company were not merely the first mover but the only mover -- in the fantasy world of geeks who lament the spread of QWERTY keyboards and Microsoft software, this would surely mean the company would have a lock on the market and in short order establish a monopoly, fleecing the powerless consumers. Rewind to the mid-1990s when everyone figured virtual reality was the future of video game-like experiences. Its hype extended to popular movies and music videos, its intrinsic appeal is easy enough to grasp, so the demand for a virtual reality toy was certainly there. Maybe it wouldn't be as cool as what the military used, but it would still be cool, and you get what you pay for.
Against this background of massive hype for virtual reality, Nintendo released the Virtual Boy in 1995, which offered something of a VR experience. Again, not the most high-tech thing you'd ever seen, but if you wanted virtual reality, it was the only game in town, and it wasn't even expensive at $180. However, the games for it were awful, and instead of passively giving in to a piece of shit technology, consumers refused to buy it -- and therefore, any virtual reality system -- altogether. Imagine it: no competition at all, plus the first mover advantage, plus benefiting from the virtual reality craze of the time -- and yet, this was Nintendo's most pathetic selling system of all, and it was discontinued the year after its release. This result is the exact opposite of what we'd expect if the inferior lock-in and first mover advantage ideas held any water at all.
It could be that the mostly Baby Boomer academics and managers who ran with these nutty ideas couldn't have drawn on video game evidence first-hand. But now that most nerds and managers are Generation X or younger, it should be much easier to offer evidence that they won't reject. They'll probably carve the universe in two, as most religions do -- the laws of supply and demand, and so on, apply to video games, sure, but anything related to Microsoft is described by inferior lock-in, bla bla bla, because they are the devil, not a real-life company like Nintendo or Sony. But as long as manage to chip away at the religions of academia and the managerial elite, it's worth it.
August 5, 2009
Aesthetics and our evolutionary history
I might write up longer reviews later, but short plugs will have to do for now. I recently finished Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct and a write-up of the Komar and Melamid project to find out what people truly desire in paintings, Painting by Numbers. They're the first two books in my Amazon box above, and both are cheap.
The Art Instinct does a decent job of summarizing the findings of evolutionary aesthetics -- that is, what evolution-minded social scientists have discovered people like, and perhaps why that's so, given how we evolved.
But the real value of this book is that Dutton is an aesthetics philosopher, and so is far more knowledgeable about aesthetic questions and debates. Most of the participants in these debates argue mostly on intuition, without really trying to justify those hunches. Dutton puts them under the evolutionist's microscope and shows why the gut feelings of even ivory tower aestheticians are mostly adequately explained by features of sexual selection.
For example, if part of the ultimate reason that artists make art is to signal their greater genetic quality to potential mates and allies, then finding out that they somehow faked it would disgust the audience -- even though the purely aesthetic qualities of that artwork had not changed. We feel the need to penalize them for dishonest signalling, not for having created ugly art -- we liked it perfectly well before we found out it had been faked.
This is just one case, but most of the middle and later sections of the book are like this -- Dutton illuminating debates both old and new in aesthetics by casting them in terms of evolution. This makes the book much more fascinating for the target audience, who probably know a lot about evolution or evolutionary psychology but much less about art and aesthetics.
In this way, it is unlike the dry lists of "things humans find attractive" and why that makes sense in light of our evolutionary history. Those are neat too, but they don't provide you with any new data -- you already knew that hourglass shapes were hotter than pear shapes, that young girls and dirty old men go together better than young bucks and dirty old women, that we like fatty and sweet foods, etc. The fun part is in speculating about, and hopefully testing ideas about, where these tastes come from.
I'll bet you didn't know much about our innate tastes for landscapes, though, or for painting in general. Dutton, along with many others, mentions the work of the artists Komar and Melamid, who got funding to survey a random and representative sample of people about their tastes in art. The result was essentially a landscape painting, mostly blue but with a fair amount of green too, with a body of water, women and children, and domestic animals in their true habitat.
Their surveys contain much more information than the summaries of their work usually include, though, and for that you have to read Painting by Numbers. It's a very cool book. It has an opening description of the project and extensive interviews with Komar and Melamid, which are pretty funny for their view into how out of touch the Art World is with people's tastes -- or even the suggestion that artists *should* concern themselves with what people want. The full tables of data are included, as well as the resulting paintings that would most please and most offend the tastes of the people in the various countries surveyed.
There's also a pretty boring essay by Arthur Danto, a token inclusion of "the other side," but you can easily skip that.
For the data, paintings, and humorous interviews, it's well worth getting your hands on. I should add for the the data junkies out there that the data are cross-tabulated, so you can see how the preference for red as your favorite color changes across education levels, income levels, age, sex, geographic region, and so on. Or how does a preference for busy vs. tranquil painting vary across those groups. Fun stuff to flip through -- and there's a lot of it.
So this turned out longer than I'd planned, meaning I probably won't write up longer reviews. Still, I'll probably be referring to them sometime soon, as they're packed with lots of ideas to pursue further. In any case, I recommend them both.
The Art Instinct does a decent job of summarizing the findings of evolutionary aesthetics -- that is, what evolution-minded social scientists have discovered people like, and perhaps why that's so, given how we evolved.
But the real value of this book is that Dutton is an aesthetics philosopher, and so is far more knowledgeable about aesthetic questions and debates. Most of the participants in these debates argue mostly on intuition, without really trying to justify those hunches. Dutton puts them under the evolutionist's microscope and shows why the gut feelings of even ivory tower aestheticians are mostly adequately explained by features of sexual selection.
For example, if part of the ultimate reason that artists make art is to signal their greater genetic quality to potential mates and allies, then finding out that they somehow faked it would disgust the audience -- even though the purely aesthetic qualities of that artwork had not changed. We feel the need to penalize them for dishonest signalling, not for having created ugly art -- we liked it perfectly well before we found out it had been faked.
This is just one case, but most of the middle and later sections of the book are like this -- Dutton illuminating debates both old and new in aesthetics by casting them in terms of evolution. This makes the book much more fascinating for the target audience, who probably know a lot about evolution or evolutionary psychology but much less about art and aesthetics.
In this way, it is unlike the dry lists of "things humans find attractive" and why that makes sense in light of our evolutionary history. Those are neat too, but they don't provide you with any new data -- you already knew that hourglass shapes were hotter than pear shapes, that young girls and dirty old men go together better than young bucks and dirty old women, that we like fatty and sweet foods, etc. The fun part is in speculating about, and hopefully testing ideas about, where these tastes come from.
I'll bet you didn't know much about our innate tastes for landscapes, though, or for painting in general. Dutton, along with many others, mentions the work of the artists Komar and Melamid, who got funding to survey a random and representative sample of people about their tastes in art. The result was essentially a landscape painting, mostly blue but with a fair amount of green too, with a body of water, women and children, and domestic animals in their true habitat.
Their surveys contain much more information than the summaries of their work usually include, though, and for that you have to read Painting by Numbers. It's a very cool book. It has an opening description of the project and extensive interviews with Komar and Melamid, which are pretty funny for their view into how out of touch the Art World is with people's tastes -- or even the suggestion that artists *should* concern themselves with what people want. The full tables of data are included, as well as the resulting paintings that would most please and most offend the tastes of the people in the various countries surveyed.
There's also a pretty boring essay by Arthur Danto, a token inclusion of "the other side," but you can easily skip that.
For the data, paintings, and humorous interviews, it's well worth getting your hands on. I should add for the the data junkies out there that the data are cross-tabulated, so you can see how the preference for red as your favorite color changes across education levels, income levels, age, sex, geographic region, and so on. Or how does a preference for busy vs. tranquil painting vary across those groups. Fun stuff to flip through -- and there's a lot of it.
So this turned out longer than I'd planned, meaning I probably won't write up longer reviews. Still, I'll probably be referring to them sometime soon, as they're packed with lots of ideas to pursue further. In any case, I recommend them both.
August 3, 2009
Black IQ and climate, rethinking the decline in formality, and changes in arts appreciation
Those are the first three articles that I've posted to my new blog, Patterns in science and culture, where all of my data-rich posts will go from now on. Read about it in more detail here. I decided to make it pay-by-article rather than a subscription, just so you know exactly how much you'll get; plus I've made it so that each long post only costs fifty cents ($10 for 20 in-depth articles), with shorter data-containing posts thrown in free.
I took to heart what bbartlog said about free competing with not-free, so I'm not going to have the two sites compete at all. This blog, and what I write for GNXP, will have no data -- facts, arguments, sure, but not a look at a set of data -- while the for-purchase site will have all of my data-driven posts, whether in-depth or casual. That should distinguish the two brands, as they say.
So things here will be more observational and brief. If you want an original in-depth look at the topics I normally cover, or a quick look at just about anything (say, from the GSS), you'll have to visit the Patterns in science and culture site. I've put a new PayPal button up at the top of this site. You're only ten dollars away from a limited edition of 20 handcrafted artisanal articles, rich with authentic insight and detail. Own your piece of blogging history today.
I took to heart what bbartlog said about free competing with not-free, so I'm not going to have the two sites compete at all. This blog, and what I write for GNXP, will have no data -- facts, arguments, sure, but not a look at a set of data -- while the for-purchase site will have all of my data-driven posts, whether in-depth or casual. That should distinguish the two brands, as they say.
So things here will be more observational and brief. If you want an original in-depth look at the topics I normally cover, or a quick look at just about anything (say, from the GSS), you'll have to visit the Patterns in science and culture site. I've put a new PayPal button up at the top of this site. You're only ten dollars away from a limited edition of 20 handcrafted artisanal articles, rich with authentic insight and detail. Own your piece of blogging history today.
August 2, 2009
Table of contents for data-rich blog
Table of contents for data-rich blog
1. Climate and civilization among Blacks. I look at how climate affects IQ, imprisonment rates, and college degree-earning rates among Blacks, using state-level data. This is a follow-up to a similar post I wrote about Whites.
2. Was there a decline in formality during the 20th C? Here, I look at data on changes in naming preferences that question the widespread view that we've "become less formal."
3. Are the arts in decline? I've dug up annual data on theater attendance and the number of playing weeks for both Broadway and road shows from 1955 to 2006. I discuss the overall trend, the notable departures from the trend, and how in-synch or out-of-synch the Broadway and road show data have been over time.
Brief: Science knowledge across the lifespan. I use GSS data to construct a 13-question quiz of basic math and science knowledge, and see how well people do on it at different ages. Do people learn more and more, does their knowledge atrophy from lack of use, or does it pretty much stay put once it's in there during your required schooling?
4. Class and religious fundamentalism in red and blue states. Using the GSS, I find the relationship between two measures of fundamentalist religious beliefs and four measures of social class, once for blue states and again for red states. Are fundamentalist beliefs more a function of social class or regional culture?
5. Intelligence and patronizing the arts in red and blue states. Similar to entry 4, but now looking at four measures of going out to arts performances. Same question as before: is having an artsy leisure life more influenced by IQ or by regional culture?
Brief: Do Asians consume boat loads of carbohydrates? In order to see whether Asians consume lots of rice or carbs in general, as many believe, I look at USDA international data on grain consumption per capita for India, Indonesia, South Africa, Iran, Japan, China, South Korea, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Australia, Hungary, Canada, and the U.S. I've broken down each country's consumption by grain in two tables, as well as make a graph of total grain consumption per capita for an easy comparison. Grains studied include barley, corn, oats, rice, rye, sorghum, and wheat.
6. The rate of invention from 0 to 2008 A.D. I've found a book with 1001 world-changing inventions, and I've transcribed the dates and plotted the number of inventions over time, by century, half-century, decade, year, and a 10-year moving average of the yearly data. I've written before about the slowing pace of innovation since Bell Labs and the DoD were broken up in the mid-1980s, using a dataset of 100 modern inventions, so this allows for an independent test of that claim. (And the new post obviously gives a clearer picture since there are 10 times as many data-points.) It also puts recent trends in larger historical perspective. I discuss some plausible genetic and institutional causes for the rise of invention. There is not only a trend that stretches across centuries, but an apparent cycle on the order of human generations.
7. The changing social climate of young people from 1870 to present. I quantitatively search through the archives of the Harvard Crimson (the undergrad newspaper) to see how the zeitgeist has changed over time. Young people typically leave very little written record, let alone over such a long stretch of time, so this presents a uniquely fine-grained picture of the social forces they faced. The topics include identity politics (with five topics and a composite index), religion (also five topics and a composite), and generational awareness. There are some things that everyone knew, but there are quite a few surprises, such as when the obsession with racism or sexism peaks. There are large swings up and down over time, supporting a cyclical view of history. I discuss what kinds of processes or models are necessary to explain such patterns.
Brief: Relationship anger by political views for men and women. The stereotype is that liberal women are more combative and temperamental in relationships, compared to the more docile and even-headed conservative women. I look at the GSS and see if it's true. I look at the same question for men to see if the pattern is different.
Brief: Have we gotten more or less sympathetic since Adam Smith's time? Here I look at the NYT's coverage of Japan and Indonesia over the past 30 years to see if it is driven more by sympathy for their plight or fear about the threat they pose to us. This tests Adam Smith's claim that we care more about nearby disasters than faraway ones -- and so, whether things have changed much since his day. By splitting sympathy into two components, I argue that the data show we've become more sympathetic in one way, but have stayed the same in another.
8. Youthful exuberance: Age and the housing bubble. Here I investigate the basis for the string of stories we heard about 4 years ago about the increasing number of 20-somethings who refused to grow up and were more and more living at home through their adult years. I use homeownership data broken apart by age group to see how the age distribution of homeowners has changed since 1982, how the homeownership rate has changed for the the various age groups -- especially the very youngest group (under 25) that the stories were talking about -- and how the changes in homeownership rates during the housing bubble compare when we look at different demographic groups. For example, did under-25 people enjoy a larger jump than Hispanics or single mothers? This provides a useful way to compare the trends among age groups.
Brief: When did elite whites start obsessing over blacks? I search the Harvard Crimson archives for "negro" to see when African-Americans started to enter the consciousness of elite whites, and at what speed it increases afterward. This allows me to test whether whites were complacent / ignorant before the Civil Rights movement, as one popular view has it, and were woken up by the events of the 1950s and later.
9. Has the free market been taken too seriously or not seriously enough? Paul Krugman recently claimed that one reason economists failed to predict the current crisis is that they weren't sufficiently skeptical of the market to bring about desirable outcomes. I search the econ journals in JSTOR for various phrases relating to market failure -- asymmetric information, adverse selection, network externalities, and irrational exuberance -- to see whether or not market skeptics have gotten a lot or a little attention over the past 30 to 40 years. To put things in context, I also compare the popularity in each year of these new ideas to the popularity of standard economic concepts like supply and demand.
10. What predicts income dissatisfaction? I use GSS data to test the idea that the higher your status, the more dissatisfied you'll be with your income. For example, it could be that people's expectations of their livelihood rise faster than their income. I show how income dissatisfaction changes according to income, class identification, job prestige, intelligence, education, age, race, and sex. Surprisingly, the sex difference is the largest of all.
11. How are religiosity and teen pregnancy related? States with higher religiosity scores also have higher teen pregnancy rates, but does this pattern reflect individual-level patterns or not? I use the GSS to see whether age at first birth predicts greater religiosity -- that is, if the state-level pattern is just an individual-level pattern writ large -- or if teen mothers are less religious, so that their state's greater religiosity is just a response to their reckless behavior. Using three measures of religious beliefs and three measures of religious practice, I find evidence of both forces at work.
1. Climate and civilization among Blacks. I look at how climate affects IQ, imprisonment rates, and college degree-earning rates among Blacks, using state-level data. This is a follow-up to a similar post I wrote about Whites.
2. Was there a decline in formality during the 20th C? Here, I look at data on changes in naming preferences that question the widespread view that we've "become less formal."
3. Are the arts in decline? I've dug up annual data on theater attendance and the number of playing weeks for both Broadway and road shows from 1955 to 2006. I discuss the overall trend, the notable departures from the trend, and how in-synch or out-of-synch the Broadway and road show data have been over time.
Brief: Science knowledge across the lifespan. I use GSS data to construct a 13-question quiz of basic math and science knowledge, and see how well people do on it at different ages. Do people learn more and more, does their knowledge atrophy from lack of use, or does it pretty much stay put once it's in there during your required schooling?
4. Class and religious fundamentalism in red and blue states. Using the GSS, I find the relationship between two measures of fundamentalist religious beliefs and four measures of social class, once for blue states and again for red states. Are fundamentalist beliefs more a function of social class or regional culture?
5. Intelligence and patronizing the arts in red and blue states. Similar to entry 4, but now looking at four measures of going out to arts performances. Same question as before: is having an artsy leisure life more influenced by IQ or by regional culture?
Brief: Do Asians consume boat loads of carbohydrates? In order to see whether Asians consume lots of rice or carbs in general, as many believe, I look at USDA international data on grain consumption per capita for India, Indonesia, South Africa, Iran, Japan, China, South Korea, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Australia, Hungary, Canada, and the U.S. I've broken down each country's consumption by grain in two tables, as well as make a graph of total grain consumption per capita for an easy comparison. Grains studied include barley, corn, oats, rice, rye, sorghum, and wheat.
6. The rate of invention from 0 to 2008 A.D. I've found a book with 1001 world-changing inventions, and I've transcribed the dates and plotted the number of inventions over time, by century, half-century, decade, year, and a 10-year moving average of the yearly data. I've written before about the slowing pace of innovation since Bell Labs and the DoD were broken up in the mid-1980s, using a dataset of 100 modern inventions, so this allows for an independent test of that claim. (And the new post obviously gives a clearer picture since there are 10 times as many data-points.) It also puts recent trends in larger historical perspective. I discuss some plausible genetic and institutional causes for the rise of invention. There is not only a trend that stretches across centuries, but an apparent cycle on the order of human generations.
7. The changing social climate of young people from 1870 to present. I quantitatively search through the archives of the Harvard Crimson (the undergrad newspaper) to see how the zeitgeist has changed over time. Young people typically leave very little written record, let alone over such a long stretch of time, so this presents a uniquely fine-grained picture of the social forces they faced. The topics include identity politics (with five topics and a composite index), religion (also five topics and a composite), and generational awareness. There are some things that everyone knew, but there are quite a few surprises, such as when the obsession with racism or sexism peaks. There are large swings up and down over time, supporting a cyclical view of history. I discuss what kinds of processes or models are necessary to explain such patterns.
Brief: Relationship anger by political views for men and women. The stereotype is that liberal women are more combative and temperamental in relationships, compared to the more docile and even-headed conservative women. I look at the GSS and see if it's true. I look at the same question for men to see if the pattern is different.
Brief: Have we gotten more or less sympathetic since Adam Smith's time? Here I look at the NYT's coverage of Japan and Indonesia over the past 30 years to see if it is driven more by sympathy for their plight or fear about the threat they pose to us. This tests Adam Smith's claim that we care more about nearby disasters than faraway ones -- and so, whether things have changed much since his day. By splitting sympathy into two components, I argue that the data show we've become more sympathetic in one way, but have stayed the same in another.
8. Youthful exuberance: Age and the housing bubble. Here I investigate the basis for the string of stories we heard about 4 years ago about the increasing number of 20-somethings who refused to grow up and were more and more living at home through their adult years. I use homeownership data broken apart by age group to see how the age distribution of homeowners has changed since 1982, how the homeownership rate has changed for the the various age groups -- especially the very youngest group (under 25) that the stories were talking about -- and how the changes in homeownership rates during the housing bubble compare when we look at different demographic groups. For example, did under-25 people enjoy a larger jump than Hispanics or single mothers? This provides a useful way to compare the trends among age groups.
Brief: When did elite whites start obsessing over blacks? I search the Harvard Crimson archives for "negro" to see when African-Americans started to enter the consciousness of elite whites, and at what speed it increases afterward. This allows me to test whether whites were complacent / ignorant before the Civil Rights movement, as one popular view has it, and were woken up by the events of the 1950s and later.
9. Has the free market been taken too seriously or not seriously enough? Paul Krugman recently claimed that one reason economists failed to predict the current crisis is that they weren't sufficiently skeptical of the market to bring about desirable outcomes. I search the econ journals in JSTOR for various phrases relating to market failure -- asymmetric information, adverse selection, network externalities, and irrational exuberance -- to see whether or not market skeptics have gotten a lot or a little attention over the past 30 to 40 years. To put things in context, I also compare the popularity in each year of these new ideas to the popularity of standard economic concepts like supply and demand.
10. What predicts income dissatisfaction? I use GSS data to test the idea that the higher your status, the more dissatisfied you'll be with your income. For example, it could be that people's expectations of their livelihood rise faster than their income. I show how income dissatisfaction changes according to income, class identification, job prestige, intelligence, education, age, race, and sex. Surprisingly, the sex difference is the largest of all.
11. How are religiosity and teen pregnancy related? States with higher religiosity scores also have higher teen pregnancy rates, but does this pattern reflect individual-level patterns or not? I use the GSS to see whether age at first birth predicts greater religiosity -- that is, if the state-level pattern is just an individual-level pattern writ large -- or if teen mothers are less religious, so that their state's greater religiosity is just a response to their reckless behavior. Using three measures of religious beliefs and three measures of religious practice, I find evidence of both forces at work.
July 31, 2009
Video game weekend: The PS3 really does suck, and the Wii really does rule
First, let me state at the outset that I don't own any of the current-generation home consoles, although I do own a Nintendo DS. My Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx 16, and Game Boy Player for the GameCube offer a superior library of games. So I have no stake in who wins the current console competition (let's leave the phrase "X wars" in the '90s where it belongs). Instead, I simply consider sales data from market research group NPD, as reported in the latest issue of Game Informer -- and as hand-checked by me (5 of the 20 data were errors!).
The list only includes the top 20 best-selling games (in units sold) of May 2009; obviously it would be better to have a more complete list. Still, this will do. They include 6 games for the Wii, 5 for the DS, 6 for the Xbox 360, and 3 for the PlayStation 3.
To get a better feel for a game's true, underlying quality, I excluded all games that were released in that month. The reason is simple: when a game is just released, its initial sales are mostly determined by the advertising budget, the hype it gets on the internet, and word-of-mouth exuberance in anticipation of its release. It's only after it's been out of the gate for a month or so that actual game players have had time to familiarize themselves with the game and talk about it to each other, post their opinions on the internet, and so on. Only then can we tell whether the game can survive on its merits rather than pure hype and PR.
If an overhyped game turns out to stink, people will talk about this, and its sales will crash in the next month and remain low. On the other hand, if an underrated game gets enough word-of-mouth praise, it can enter the best-selling list after its release month.
Doing this leaves 12 of the original 20 games, showing that nearly half of all best-selling games in a month probably benefit only from the producer's PR and fanboy hype, and that they likely fall off a cliff almost right away. Some of these games released in May could in fact prove strong, but the release dates from the list overall don't offer them much hope.
Of the 12 that have proven themselves over time, 5 are for the Nintendo DS (0 were cut), 4 are for the Nintendo Wii (2 were cut), 3 are for the Xbox 360 (3 were cut), and 0 are for the PlayStation 3 (all 3 were cut). The surviving Xbox 360 games are all below the original top 10, while 3 of the surviving Wii games and 1 of the surviving DS games are in the original top 10. The oldest game on the list is Mario Kart DS, which came out three and a half years before, and the second-oldest is New Super Mario Bros for the DS, which came out three years before. Imagine a Hollywood studio producing two movies that were in theaters for three years and counting!
In a world of fickle consumers who ruthlessly heap scorn on shitty games and gush over the great ones, the staying power of Nintendo's DS and Wii games, and of Microsoft's Xbox 360 games, is as reliable of an indicator of quality as we can imagine. For the same reason, the pathetic showing of PS3 games explains why its hardware sales are in last place by far -- no one wants to play the software for that system. Their game sales benefit only from pre-release hype and PR -- once people get around to playing them, and talking about them, their sales take a nose-dive.
As I said before, I don't care who wins, and that's probably why I'm not blinded in the whole matter. It was just an issue of looking up some numbers in a magazine I happened to be flipping through. On an objective basis, we conclude that Nintendo currently puts out the best games, although the Xbox 360's games are not terribly far behind, and the PS3 is the present-day reincarnation of the overhyped Neo Geo home console from the early 1990s.
As an older-minded video game player, it's heartening to see that all 5 of the best-selling handheld games have proven themselves over time -- none were due to hype and PR of that month -- and for quite some time. It just goes to show that one system's superior hardware capabilities don't mean shit if the games for it are boring. This allows a mostly 2-D handheld system to crush a 3-D home system that has more realistic graphics. I hesitate to say "better" graphics, since maybe the average person doesn't want straight-up realism and dark shading, but rather prefers vibrant colors and a fantasy look. But innate human preferences and video game aesthetics are another topic altogether.
The list only includes the top 20 best-selling games (in units sold) of May 2009; obviously it would be better to have a more complete list. Still, this will do. They include 6 games for the Wii, 5 for the DS, 6 for the Xbox 360, and 3 for the PlayStation 3.
To get a better feel for a game's true, underlying quality, I excluded all games that were released in that month. The reason is simple: when a game is just released, its initial sales are mostly determined by the advertising budget, the hype it gets on the internet, and word-of-mouth exuberance in anticipation of its release. It's only after it's been out of the gate for a month or so that actual game players have had time to familiarize themselves with the game and talk about it to each other, post their opinions on the internet, and so on. Only then can we tell whether the game can survive on its merits rather than pure hype and PR.
If an overhyped game turns out to stink, people will talk about this, and its sales will crash in the next month and remain low. On the other hand, if an underrated game gets enough word-of-mouth praise, it can enter the best-selling list after its release month.
Doing this leaves 12 of the original 20 games, showing that nearly half of all best-selling games in a month probably benefit only from the producer's PR and fanboy hype, and that they likely fall off a cliff almost right away. Some of these games released in May could in fact prove strong, but the release dates from the list overall don't offer them much hope.
Of the 12 that have proven themselves over time, 5 are for the Nintendo DS (0 were cut), 4 are for the Nintendo Wii (2 were cut), 3 are for the Xbox 360 (3 were cut), and 0 are for the PlayStation 3 (all 3 were cut). The surviving Xbox 360 games are all below the original top 10, while 3 of the surviving Wii games and 1 of the surviving DS games are in the original top 10. The oldest game on the list is Mario Kart DS, which came out three and a half years before, and the second-oldest is New Super Mario Bros for the DS, which came out three years before. Imagine a Hollywood studio producing two movies that were in theaters for three years and counting!
In a world of fickle consumers who ruthlessly heap scorn on shitty games and gush over the great ones, the staying power of Nintendo's DS and Wii games, and of Microsoft's Xbox 360 games, is as reliable of an indicator of quality as we can imagine. For the same reason, the pathetic showing of PS3 games explains why its hardware sales are in last place by far -- no one wants to play the software for that system. Their game sales benefit only from pre-release hype and PR -- once people get around to playing them, and talking about them, their sales take a nose-dive.
As I said before, I don't care who wins, and that's probably why I'm not blinded in the whole matter. It was just an issue of looking up some numbers in a magazine I happened to be flipping through. On an objective basis, we conclude that Nintendo currently puts out the best games, although the Xbox 360's games are not terribly far behind, and the PS3 is the present-day reincarnation of the overhyped Neo Geo home console from the early 1990s.
As an older-minded video game player, it's heartening to see that all 5 of the best-selling handheld games have proven themselves over time -- none were due to hype and PR of that month -- and for quite some time. It just goes to show that one system's superior hardware capabilities don't mean shit if the games for it are boring. This allows a mostly 2-D handheld system to crush a 3-D home system that has more realistic graphics. I hesitate to say "better" graphics, since maybe the average person doesn't want straight-up realism and dark shading, but rather prefers vibrant colors and a fantasy look. But innate human preferences and video game aesthetics are another topic altogether.
July 30, 2009
The decline of kids' rough-house play, as shown through Nickelodeon
With the adoption of cable TV during the 1980s, channels could target themselves toward a narrower niche than before, and one obvious way to carve up the previously heterogeneous audiences was by age. Nickelodeon aimed itself at kids roughly aged 5 to 13, I'd say. By taking a brief look at how its programming has changed, we can track changes in what parents find acceptable for their kids to watch and imitate.
As with video games, the golden age of Nickelodeon lasted from about 1986 to 1994, and a large part of that was their game shows. Now, they don't even exist -- just have a look at their current vs. previous programming by genre. The physically oriented ones more or less stop in the mid-1990s. This could be part of the larger civilizing trend that began then, whereby violent crime and child abuse started plummeting -- no more wild and crazy kids.
It's not as if physical challenges between individuals or teams are a fad, like America's Funniest Home Videos was. Game shows like Double Dare were were wacky and different enough -- and short enough -- that kids could tune in for a half-hour and get into the competitive excitement. They were sports shows, just for kids. But today's helicopter parents are probably too worried about their kids trying to recreate what they see -- especially for a game like Finders Keepers where the kids go on a rampage tearing up a staged house looking for prizes.
It would be interesting to see how far this extends -- are little kids today deprived of the joy of building forts out of cardboard boxes and couch cushions? If you've been to a park recently and seen how close the parents stand next to their kids -- as opposed to being somewhere else altogether, or not even being at the park to supervise them at all -- then it doesn't sound so crazy.
Oh, go back and look at the differences in the "educational" genre of Nickelodeon's programming. In the '80s, the most popular show by far was Mr. Wizard's World -- I still vividly recall waking up each morning at 5am (I believe) to catch it. This was a general science and technology appreciation show -- show the kids how buoyancy makes some things float and other sink, what acids and bases are (using examples from around the house), and if memory serves, he even showed kids how to build some kind of toy rocket to launch in the backyard. Just try showing that on Nickelodeon today.
(Update: my memory rules, at least for cool things like setting up a rocket in your backyard -- there's a video clip of this demonstration on the DVD webpage. Check out the info pages for all of the volumes and note the several demonstrations dealing with fire, explosions, etc. Ah, it was another time.)
Now the educational programs are just a bunch of environmentalist propaganda. So much for science and education -- just try to brainwash the poor little bastards. There was a transition period during the early or mid-1990s when Beakman's World and Bill Nye the Science Guy were popular -- and Beakman's World was broadcast on Saturday morning, competing against cartoons!
Kids these days are doing basically as well as kids from previous days did as far as science and math achievement in school. So lacking these shows isn't harming them in that way. But being deprived of role models could affect how pumped they are to enter the math, science, and technology fields. I don't mean "role models" only in terms of people they look up to, but as someone who shows that a science or tech person can make it and get respect in popular culture. If kids think that the field or job is for losers, even the ones who could hack it will turn to something more glamorous, like working for Wall Street or the ACLU.
As with video games, the golden age of Nickelodeon lasted from about 1986 to 1994, and a large part of that was their game shows. Now, they don't even exist -- just have a look at their current vs. previous programming by genre. The physically oriented ones more or less stop in the mid-1990s. This could be part of the larger civilizing trend that began then, whereby violent crime and child abuse started plummeting -- no more wild and crazy kids.
It's not as if physical challenges between individuals or teams are a fad, like America's Funniest Home Videos was. Game shows like Double Dare were were wacky and different enough -- and short enough -- that kids could tune in for a half-hour and get into the competitive excitement. They were sports shows, just for kids. But today's helicopter parents are probably too worried about their kids trying to recreate what they see -- especially for a game like Finders Keepers where the kids go on a rampage tearing up a staged house looking for prizes.
It would be interesting to see how far this extends -- are little kids today deprived of the joy of building forts out of cardboard boxes and couch cushions? If you've been to a park recently and seen how close the parents stand next to their kids -- as opposed to being somewhere else altogether, or not even being at the park to supervise them at all -- then it doesn't sound so crazy.
Oh, go back and look at the differences in the "educational" genre of Nickelodeon's programming. In the '80s, the most popular show by far was Mr. Wizard's World -- I still vividly recall waking up each morning at 5am (I believe) to catch it. This was a general science and technology appreciation show -- show the kids how buoyancy makes some things float and other sink, what acids and bases are (using examples from around the house), and if memory serves, he even showed kids how to build some kind of toy rocket to launch in the backyard. Just try showing that on Nickelodeon today.
(Update: my memory rules, at least for cool things like setting up a rocket in your backyard -- there's a video clip of this demonstration on the DVD webpage. Check out the info pages for all of the volumes and note the several demonstrations dealing with fire, explosions, etc. Ah, it was another time.)
Now the educational programs are just a bunch of environmentalist propaganda. So much for science and education -- just try to brainwash the poor little bastards. There was a transition period during the early or mid-1990s when Beakman's World and Bill Nye the Science Guy were popular -- and Beakman's World was broadcast on Saturday morning, competing against cartoons!
Kids these days are doing basically as well as kids from previous days did as far as science and math achievement in school. So lacking these shows isn't harming them in that way. But being deprived of role models could affect how pumped they are to enter the math, science, and technology fields. I don't mean "role models" only in terms of people they look up to, but as someone who shows that a science or tech person can make it and get respect in popular culture. If kids think that the field or job is for losers, even the ones who could hack it will turn to something more glamorous, like working for Wall Street or the ACLU.
July 29, 2009
More moronic antitrust actions to follow
The antitrust bureaucracy, having few real threats to take on, is once again just making shit up in order for them to keep their cushy jobs. First they busted up the Hollywood studio system -- and output did not shoot up, and prices did not fall. (See Arthur De Vany's Hollywood Economics.) So that's one they got wrong. Then they busted up AT&T, and Bell Labs along with it -- and the output of major new innovations virtually stopped the next year. And they really let their cluelessness show in the Microsoft case. (See Liebowitz and Margolis' Winners, Losers, and Microsoft.) I've included both of these must-read books in my Amazon frame above.
I don't pretend to know everything about every industry, but that would make me a better antitrust enforcer than the idiots who run things. They assume that they know the ins and outs of an industry that they are quite ignorant of -- Hollywood and Microsoft being the two greatest examples. Still, I know enough just from reading newspapers that I can outsmart the dolts in the antitrust division. For example, here's a description of their worries about wireless phone services:
Oh no, a sharp increase in prices -- it can only be due to a rising monopoly! Because these idiots didn't pay attention in freshman econ class, I'll remind them of the law of supply and demand: all else equal, when demand increases, so does price. It's incredibly simple. Price could also increase if supply decreased (as when a monopoly restricts output), but it sure doesn't seem like text messages are becoming a scarcer and scarcer resource. So, just going with the basic laws of economics, rather than assume something unusual, let's ask if demand for text messaging is increasing. If so, then that's it, and the government should just butt out.
From an article just two days later about the dangers of driving while texting:
What do you know, a tenfold increase in three years! There's your answer for why texting rates are shooting up -- the demand for them is too. It's probably a demographic change, in that more and more of the cell phone-owning population come from the more recent cohorts who prefer texting over talking. Or it could be due to something else, but we sure don't need to invoke monopolistic forces.
This same retarded view dominated during the housing bubble too -- the skyrocketing prices could not possibly have to do with skyrocketing demand, namely from the irrational exuberance that everyone was under. "OMG, I like have to buy a second house, or buy one and flip it -- prices only go up!" No, instead we heard a bunch of malarky about the decreasing supply -- not due to a monopoly (at least the story wasn't that stupid), but because we were supposedly running out of land everywhere, not just in the fashionable places like usual.
In the minds of the elite, there is no such thing as the effect of real, breathing human beings' demand -- i.e., their hopes, fears, and desires. They only grant causal powers to producers who can restrict supply to drive up prices -- the Big Evil Corporation screwing the little guy -- or flood the market with supply to make it cheap -- the Big Evil Corporation trying to get people hooked on cheap crap (fast food, Wal Mart furniture, whatever).
Unfortunately, the antitrust division looks like it still doesn't have a clue. At least for the one case that I could check with no more investigation than reading a few newspaper articles a day, training their crosshairs on the cell phone industry is completely bogus. All they need to do is to leave an industry that they don't understand alone, and go get a life.
I don't pretend to know everything about every industry, but that would make me a better antitrust enforcer than the idiots who run things. They assume that they know the ins and outs of an industry that they are quite ignorant of -- Hollywood and Microsoft being the two greatest examples. Still, I know enough just from reading newspapers that I can outsmart the dolts in the antitrust division. For example, here's a description of their worries about wireless phone services:
The division's wireless inquiry is looking at, among other things, whether it is legal for phone makers to offer a particular model, like the iPhone or the Palm Pre, exclusively to one phone carrier. It is examining the sharp increase in text-messaging rates at several phone companies. And it is scrutinizing obstacles imposed by the phone companies on low-price rivals like Skype.
Oh no, a sharp increase in prices -- it can only be due to a rising monopoly! Because these idiots didn't pay attention in freshman econ class, I'll remind them of the law of supply and demand: all else equal, when demand increases, so does price. It's incredibly simple. Price could also increase if supply decreased (as when a monopoly restricts output), but it sure doesn't seem like text messages are becoming a scarcer and scarcer resource. So, just going with the basic laws of economics, rather than assume something unusual, let's ask if demand for text messaging is increasing. If so, then that's it, and the government should just butt out.
From an article just two days later about the dangers of driving while texting:
Over all, texting has soared. In December, phone users in the United States sent 110 billion messages, a tenfold increase in just three years, according to the cellular phone industry's trade group, CTIA.
What do you know, a tenfold increase in three years! There's your answer for why texting rates are shooting up -- the demand for them is too. It's probably a demographic change, in that more and more of the cell phone-owning population come from the more recent cohorts who prefer texting over talking. Or it could be due to something else, but we sure don't need to invoke monopolistic forces.
This same retarded view dominated during the housing bubble too -- the skyrocketing prices could not possibly have to do with skyrocketing demand, namely from the irrational exuberance that everyone was under. "OMG, I like have to buy a second house, or buy one and flip it -- prices only go up!" No, instead we heard a bunch of malarky about the decreasing supply -- not due to a monopoly (at least the story wasn't that stupid), but because we were supposedly running out of land everywhere, not just in the fashionable places like usual.
In the minds of the elite, there is no such thing as the effect of real, breathing human beings' demand -- i.e., their hopes, fears, and desires. They only grant causal powers to producers who can restrict supply to drive up prices -- the Big Evil Corporation screwing the little guy -- or flood the market with supply to make it cheap -- the Big Evil Corporation trying to get people hooked on cheap crap (fast food, Wal Mart furniture, whatever).
Unfortunately, the antitrust division looks like it still doesn't have a clue. At least for the one case that I could check with no more investigation than reading a few newspaper articles a day, training their crosshairs on the cell phone industry is completely bogus. All they need to do is to leave an industry that they don't understand alone, and go get a life.
July 28, 2009
Hypocrisy about sugar consumption among upper and lower status people
I don't care about uncovering the boring kind of hypocrisy, where someone has goals that they occasionally fail to meet. That's for Gen X-ers who are still stuck in their middle school goth phase. But the real, two-faced kind does irritate me -- i.e., when someone advises everyone else to do one thing, and deliberately does something else when they're not looking.
Over at my low carb blog, I just put up a post on this regarding how we treat sugar-gulpers of low vs. high social status.
Over at my low carb blog, I just put up a post on this regarding how we treat sugar-gulpers of low vs. high social status.
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