MetaFilter posts tagged with innovation

"What is an innovation worth?"

the man of twists and turns — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:16:10 -0800

Google was worth 1,838,389 workers in 1998, maybe

Incommensurable values

kliuless — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:42:30 -0800

Economists and the theory of politics - "why unions were often well worth any deadweight cost" abstract:

The standard approach to policymaking and advice in economics implicitly or explicitly ignores politics and political economy, and maintains that if possible, any market failure should be rapidly removed. This essay explains why this conclusion may be incorrect; because it ignores politics, this approach is oblivious to the impact of the removal of market failures on future political equilibria and economic efficiency, which can be deleterious. We outline a simple framework for the study of the impact of current economic policies on future political equilibria — and indirectly on future economic outcomes. We then illustrate the mechanisms through which such impacts might operate using a series of examples. The main message is that sound economic policy should be based on a careful analysis of political economy and should factor in its influence on future political equilibria.

viz. What kind of mass movement with truly powerful institutional support can take the place of unions? - "I agree with just about everything they say about the value of unions, but I also feel forced to acknowledge that it doesn't matter. As a truly powerful mass movement, unions are dead and they aren't coming back. This has left a gaping hole in American politics: Corporations and the rich continue to have enormous institutional power, while the working and middle classes have almost no one to speak for them. I figure that filling this hole is the most important problem the left has to address over the next decade or so. Unfortunately, I don't know how." cf. The Tyranny of Political Economy - "In reality, our contemporary frameworks for political economy are replete with unstated assumptions about the system of ideas underlying the operation of political systems. Make those assumptions explicit, and the decisive role of vested interests evaporates. Policy design, political leadership, and human agency come back to life... Expand the range of feasible strategies (which is what good policy design and leadership do), and you radically change behavior and outcomes." also btw...

Markets in almost nothing - "One of the first things I noticed when I started studying economics was that goods that can't be bought and sold are basically ignored."
Wealth and Motivations for Saving - "teach the public more about how wealth builds over time"
The Supply and Demand for Safe Assets - "Where do safe assets come from? Empirical evidence suggests that the private sector creates more near riskless assets when the supply of government debt is low and reduces privately-created near riskless assets when the supply of government debt is high."
The safe asset shortage - "Safe debts – or what is often called information insensitive assets, as they do not suffer from the types of financial frictions that are characteristic to other financial assets – play a major role in facilitating transactions for institutional investors. And, as we have learned in the recent years, they also play a major role in triggering financial crises when they lose their safety status and turn into information sensitive assets."
GDP, welfare and the rise of data-driven activities - "The worry today is not that investment in technology might not be as productive as we thought (the so-called computer paradox), but the fact that the economic value of the fast growing consumption and production of online data may not be adequately captured in official statistics."
Uncle Sam, venture capitalist - "AMERICA, like much of the world, is facing a crisis of innovation. Its roots rest in several significant challenges: an awareness that rapid technological progress and growth will be crucial in weathering demographic headwinds and the threat of climate change among them. But there is very little consensus in Washington on just what the government ought to be doing to help."
What Google Reader tells us about banking and nationalisation - "Which is why the government taking charge of a service like RSS for the benefit of the public good — or for that matter providing the country with universal internet or high quality media — should not necessarily be treated with suspicion or mistrust. In the civilized world there is a perfectly reasonable way to ensure arm's length detachment and to protect such institutions from the political meddling of government."
If You Can't Fix It, You Don't Own It - "Who owns our stuff? The answer used to be obvious. Now, with electronics integrated into just about everything we buy, the answer has changed. We live in a digital age, and even the physical goods we buy are complex. Copyright is impacting more people than ever before because the line between hardware and software, physical and digital has blurred. The issue goes beyond cellphone unlocking, because once we buy an object — any object — we should own it. We should be able to lift the hood, unlock it, modify it, repair it... without asking for permission from the manufacturer. But we really don't own our stuff anymore (at least not fully); the manufacturers do. Because modifying modern objects requires access to information: code, service manuals, error codes, and diagnostic tools."

like think about sovereign debt -- that is safe assets -- more as a national equity: [1,2,3,4,5]

The US national debt is in truth - like all national debts - a complete and surreal fiction: it is a national equity, the greater part of which is interest-bearing either as claims over public or private revenues. At least two-thirds of the quasi tax credits created by banks came into existence as mortgage loans, and are therefore backed by claims over the productive value of the US land and buildings which they fund. Much of the rest consists of claims over the value of US assets which fund the productive capacity of US corporations. The remainder - which provides the credit necessary to finance the circulation of goods and services in the US - is based upon the magnificent productive capacity of the US people. Only by liquidating US Incorporated could this National Equity ever be redeemed... There is no shortage of dollars because every dollar's worth of productive capacity - public or private; productive people or productive assets - in the US is the capacity to issue a dollar credit, which reflects the increase in the US national wealth which underpins the US national equity. President Barack Obama and his government should get busy creating national equity by instructing the Fed to create and issue the necessary finance for the creation of a new generation of US infrastructure; the transition to a low carbon future which the US can, and should, be leading; and in increasing the capacity of the US people to do so.

(or how the government budget constraint is different than a household's or corporation's -- namely that they can tax and can't be liquidated, unless extraordinarily mismanaged or conquered, I guess...)

"With each detonation, [it] loses just one or two legs."

bwerdmuller — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 06:45:21 -0800

A simple, beautiful solution to clearing landmines in Afghanistan. From the public filmmaker competition section of Focus Forward, a series of documentaries about people who are changing the world.

the future redefined

de — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 10:12:22 -0800

Richard Florida (previously, 2) speaks to leaders [flash 11mins] of the APEC nations, November, 2011. More recently Richard Florida addressed the RSA: Why Creativity is the New Economy. [YT 29mins]

Bill Hill, digital typography and e-book pioneer, died Wednesday.

Berkun — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 10:30:26 -0800

Bill Hill, digital typography and e-book pioneer, died Wednesday. A pioneer in using science to explain how our brains let us read, he was at Microsoft in the 1990s, and was one the inventors of ClearType, a technology for improving online reading on Windows. His passionate and entertaining lectures include Homo Sapiens 1.0 (transcript) which advocated that programmers need to learn as much about how their user's brains work rather than just OSes and programming languages, Why you only need one space after a period and the section of that talk on Why underlining hurts your brain. He died Wednesday from a heart attack.

The Instant Skyscraper

vidur — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 22:29:48 -0800

"Zhang Yue, founder and chairman of Broad Sustainable Building, is not a particularly humble man. A humble man would not have erected, on his firm’s corporate campus in the Chinese province of Hunan, a classical palace and a 130-foot replica of an Egyptian pyramid. A humble man, for that matter, would not have redirected Broad from its core business—manufacturing industrial air-conditioning units—to invent a new method of building skyscrapers. And a humble man certainly wouldn’t be putting up those skyscrapers at a pace never achieved in history." [Meet the Man Who Built a 30-Story Building in 15 Days]

Always look on the bright side of death... even as you take your (formerly) terminal breath!

markkraft — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 23:04:17 -0800

Sudden death suddenly becomes a lot less pressing. A team of scientists at the Boston Children’s Hospital have designed a microparticle that can be injected into the bloodstream which rapidly oxygenates blood, capable of keeping a person alive for up to 30 minutes after respiratory failure. This will even work if the ability to breathe has been restricted, or cut off entirely. Here's how it works, in greater detail. This finding has the potential to save millions of lives every year, and can buy emergency medical personnel a significant amount of time to address what would otherwise be fatal emergencies. It also has numerous potential applications for the Defense Department, which is funding part of the research.

Clayton Christensen

AceRock — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:31:43 -0800

Clayton Christensen is the most influential business thinker on the planet. He's been everywhere lately: On Charlie Rose, in the New Yorker (pay-walled), in the Steve Jobs biography (as the author of the only business book to have influenced Jobs). He has applied his ideas of Disruptive Innovation and Jobs-to-be-Done (pdf) to industries such as healthcare and higher education. Recently he has been trying to apply them to personal and career development. He's also a devout Mormon (and a generous Romney campaign contributor) and a cancer, stroke, and heart attack survivor.

Innovation in France

beisny — Fri, 11 May 2012 15:45:31 -0800

"Nicolas Sarkozy did very little about fostering innovation — he didn’t have a clue. As for François Hollande, the strongest part of its electorate (largely composed of teachers and other public servants) opposes any rapprochement between private sector and public higher education. And let’s not mention the underlying “ideology” of venture capital, carried interest, IPO’s, flexible employment rules, etc. Hollande’s supporters will also oppose any removal of cobwebs from the 102-year-old labor code that greatly complicates the management of companies employing 50 or more people. As a result, France has 2.4 times more companies with 49 employees than with 50..." - Francois Hollande’s Start-down Nation

Research on happiness and profit

blahblahblah — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:35:32 -0800

For my 250th post: There is a lot of interesting research going on in business schools, and some of it is even fun to watch. Wharton has been hosting 10 minute entertaining talks on cutting-edge research by faculty including: where inspiration comes from at work, how time relates to happiness, how to run an innovation tournament, socially responsible investing, learning from people who leave your company and what breakfast cereal and Steve Jobs have to tell us about the secret sources of innovation. If you want less academics in your business school mini-lectures, Stanford also has a collection of advice to entrepreneurs on many subjects that includes everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Guy Kawasaki.

"the mobile social fin de siècle"

flex — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:51:03 -0800

The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - After five years pursuing the social-local-mobile dream, we need a fresh paradigm for technology startups. "This isn't about startup incubators or policy positions. It's not about "innovation in America" or which tech blog loves startups the most. This is about how Internet technology used to feel like it was really going to change so many things about our lives. Now it has and we're all too stunned to figure out what's next. So we watch Lana Del Ray turn circles in a thousand animated gifs."

Another shady operation

flabdablet — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:01:55 -0800

Cost to park: free. Cost to charge: free.
Metrolink unveils a 2MW solar car park.

Rock 'n' Roll as the crystallized, mythologized Wild West

Sticherbeast — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:15:08 -0800

Closed Frontier: Is rock over? "Rock ’n’ roll is to 21st-century America what the Wild West was to 20th-century America: a closed frontier, ripe for mass mythology....Exciting new music still thrives in the subgenres, but modern musicians draw increasing amounts of inspiration from tradition, not originality. The sexagenarian Rolling Stones do serial victory laps around the world, just as an aging Buffalo Bill toured America and Europe in the 1880s and 90s, performing rope and horse tricks alongside Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull."

Executive Compensation

kliuless — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 04:32:10 -0800

The Incentive Bubble (ungated pdf) - "The fraying of the compact of American capitalism by rising income inequality and repeated governance crises is disturbing. But misallocations of financial, real, and human capital arising from the financial-incentive bubble are much more worrisome to those concerned with the competitiveness of the American economy."

An economy can be only as strong as the allocation mechanisms that ensure that capital of all types moves toward its highest social use. When risk is repeatedly mispriced because investors enjoy skewed incentive schemes, financial capital is being misallocated. When managers undertake unwise investments or mergers in order to meet expectations that will trigger large compensation packages, real capital is being misallocated. And when relative compensation is as distorted as it has been by the financial-incentive bubble over the past several decades, one can only assume that human capital is being misallocated, to a disturbing degree. Awakening our monitors to their responsibilities and to the flaws of market-based compensation provides the best hope for correcting these misallocations and strengthening the U.S. economy for the challenges of this century.

Satyajit Das: ~~Pravda~~ The Economist's Take on Financial Innovation - "There is no acknowledgement that much of what is called financial innovation is economic rent extraction, exploiting lack of transparency as well as information and knowledge asymmetries. There is no discussion of the destructive bonus culture which encourages certain behaviours in financial institutions... The unpalatable reality that few, self interested industry participants and their cheerleaders are prepared to admit is that much of what passes for financial innovation is specifically designed to conceal risk, obfuscate investors and reduce transparency. The process is entirely deliberate. Efficiency and transparency is not consistent with the high profit margins on Wall Street and the City. Financial products need to be opaque and priced inefficiently to produce excessive profits." Wall Street's Broken Windows - "James Q. Wilson was a political scientist who often studied the government response to blue collar crime. The public knows him best for his theory called 'broken windows...' Wilson took social norms, community, and ethics seriously. He argued that as community broke down fewer honest citizens were active in monitoring and policing behavior. The breakdown in community was criminogenic – it led to widespread serious blue collar crime. He urged us to take even minor blue collar crimes and breaches of civility seriously and to demand that they be contained through social pressure and policing... Similarly, corruption that is excused and tolerated by elites is unlikely to remain at the level of 'a few deals.' Corruption is likely to spread in incidence and severity precisely because it undermines community and the rule of law and it is likely to grow more pervasive and harmful the more we tolerate it."

The Failure of Judges and the Rise of Regulators

kliuless — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:54:39 -0800

The Control Revolution And Its Discontents - "the long process of algorithmisation over the last 150 years has also, wherever possible, replaced implicit rules/contracts and principal-agent relationships with explicit processes and rules."

This FPP © zarq. Do Not Bend, Fold, Spindle or Mutilate. Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball.

zarq — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:49:04 -0800

Kirby Ferguson's fourth and final installment of Everything is a Remix: System Failure has been released. (Also on YouTube.) It covers intellectual property rights, the derivative nature of creativity, patents and copyright. Transcript. Per his blog entry, his next project will be called "This is Not a Conspiracy Theory." Previously and Previously on MeFi. See the entire series on Vimeo: Parts One, Two, Three, Four. Official Site. Episode 1: YouTube Version / Transcript / Blog Entry Episode 2: YouTube Version / Transcript / Blog Entry Episode 3: YouTube Version / Transcript / Blog Entry

A donkey is a horse etc.

stinker — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:05:47 -0800

If collaboration doesn't produce the best results (SLNYT), why do we keep trying to force people to work collaboratively? Previously

"We Stopped Dreaming"

zarq — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 07:26:26 -0800

King of the Cosmos (A Profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson) by Carl Zimmer. (Via) Carl Zimmer's site. (Previously on MeFi) Mentioned in the article: Star Talk Radio (Previously) Neil deGrasse Tyson's Twitter. His 'Ask Me Anything' posts on Reddit: Novembert and December are quite popular. Authors @ Google: 73 minute video interview with him from February 2009 regarding his book, The Pluto Files, which discusses the public's response (hate mail from third graders!) to Pluto's demotion from planet status. A 2010 NOVA special on the subject, also called "The Pluto Files," recently re-aired on PBS on December 14, and can be viewed in its entirety online at their site. Video from the World Science Festival: Why Science Literacy Matters. Interview on SanDiego.com from August. An extensive archive of audio interviews is available at his site. Appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher: February 2011, August 2011. The title of this post comes from a comment he made during the August show. Appearance on Jon Stewart: January 2011.

"Dumbo Feather Pass It On is a stupid name for a magazine"

zarq — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:12:38 -0800

Dumbo Feather is an Australian quarterly print magazine which features five "extended (20 page) profiles of people worth knowing, across enterprise, science, politics, fashion and the arts." They're only just establishing an online presence. Profile archive is slim at the moment, but does include a lengthy interview from their current issue with Chris Anderson, curator of TED. A blog entry asks readers to submit their favorite TED talks, and an ongoing feature: Harnell Fletcher's Interviews with Children is taking submissions, too.

TRANSMISSIONS FROM TOMORROW

The Whelk — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 08:23:47 -0800

Five minutes into the future - a blog where Astro Zombie posts things he finds that appear to come from the not-so-distant future. Check out New Tombstones Adorable Cars Modular Toasters Augmented Reality Shopping and Smart Lamposts [via mefi projects]

The post stands on the shoulders of the two that came before it....

zarq — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:22:11 -0800

Part 3 of the Everything is a Remix video series has been released, by New York filmmaker Kirby Ferguson. Previously on MeFi. See the entire series on Vimeo: Parts One, Two and Three. (YouTube versions and transcripts inside.) Official Site. There will be a Part 4 released in the Fall, accompanied by a Kickstarter campaign. Episode 1: YouTube Version / Transcript / Blog Entry Episode 2: YouTube Version / Transcript / Blog Entry Episode 3: YouTube Version / Transcript / Blog Entry

Bubbles and Public Facts

kliuless — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:23:01 -0800

The Destruction of Economic Facts - "Renowned Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues that the financial crisis wasn't just about finance—it was about a staggering lack of knowledge" (via)

During the second half of the 19th century... To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible... The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account—all the relevant knowledge available... for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results... Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down...

BONUS

The Gaussian copula function tattoo
The financial crisis was a major event which was caused by Wall Street's shortsighted greed — a greed which is epitomized in the way that the copula function became ubiquitous even though risk managers and even Li himself knew full well that it was extremely limited in how it should be used. If we want to 'be vigilant and not forget' the destructive potential of Wall Street, then the Gaussian copula function is actually a really good thing to get as a tattoo. There's an irony here too. Elms got this tattoo, in part, because of its very incomprehensibility — the way it epitomizes the way that Wall Street is 'predicated in obfuscation'. But Wall Street embraced Li's formula for the opposite reason — that it was very tractable and easy to understand, at least if you were a quant with a degree in finance. Elms's tattoo is the version of the formula which I used in the Wired article — but it's not, actually, the version of the formula which was used day-to-day on Wall Street... Most representations of the copula look nothing like that, and are much harder to understand. All of which shows that Elms is absolutely right, at heart, about the copula function and what it represents. To Wall Street, it's simple and easy — disastrously so. To the rest of us, however, it makes a Semiotext(e) book look like a Sesame Street lyric. And that, I think, is why Levin and Elms are going to be disappointed, and Blankfein is going to remain out of jail. Back in 1933, when Ferdinand Pecora uncovered huge scandals on Wall Street, they were easy for all Americans to understand, and easy to protect against. This time around, Wall Street's activities are incomprehensible not only to the lay person but even to senior bankers: a big part of the reason why the crisis was so big and so bad is precisely that people like Stan O'Neal and Bob Rubin failed at their job of understanding the risks their banks were taking. They were knavishly foolish, but still more fools than knaves — which means that it's extremely hard to make a strong case in front of a jury that what they did was criminal.
The new argument against financial innovation - "It is from the not yet but soon to be famous Alp Simsek, at Harvard, and smart people tell me it is important and already influential..." cf. Speculation and Risk Sharing with New Financial Assets
While the traditional view of financial innovation emphasizes the risk sharing role of new financial assets, belief disagreements about these assets naturally lead to speculation... Financial innovation always decreases the uninsurable variance because new assets increase the possibilities for risk sharing. My main result shows that financial innovation also always increases the speculative variance. This is true even if traders completely agree about the payoffs of new assets. The intuition behind this result is the hedge-more/bet-more effect: Traders use new assets to hedge their bets on existing assets, which in turn enables them to place larger bets and take on greater risks. This effect suggests that financial innovation is more likely to be destabilizing in more complete financial markets and when it concerns derivative assets... A question emerges as to how new assets should be introduced to minimize their short run impact on the speculative variance. I show that staggering (or delaying) the introduction of new assets is not effective because it reduces traders learning simultaneously with their speculation. A viable alternative is to set temporary position limits (or taxes) on new assets.
Financial Repression - "There are only a few ways to bring down sovereign debt burdens. Growth is one, but growth may be impaired by high debt burdens. Austerity is another, but to cut debts this way requires a long period of painful policy, of the sort that's rarely tolerable to electorates. Default is another way. And rapid inflation is another way still... a fifth option—financial repression—was key to quickly and relatively painlessly addressing large sovereign debts... The tight financial controls associated with post-Depression financial regulation and the introduction of the Bretton Woods system enabled a period of financial repression that persisted from the end of the war to around 1980. This period was characterised by low real interest rates (during this time they were quite often negative) persistently, modestly high inflation rates, and rapid reduction in debt levels thanks largely to this 'financial repression tax'. It was an incredibly effective mix of policies." cf. The Liquidation of Government Debt [1,2,3]

master of information

kliuless — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 11:00:18 -0800

The New Biology - Eric Schadt's quest to upend molecular biology and open source it. (via)

Books On Demand

reenum — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 07:25:44 -0800

The library system in Polk County, Florida has installed vending machines so that patrons who aren't close to a library can still check books out.

Advance Market Commitments

kliuless — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 08:42:20 -0800

Inducement Prizes -- Best known for the Ansari X Prize, the DARPA Grand Challenge and the Clay Mathematics Millennium Problems, inducement prizes have a long history, but their recent successes have led to increased government interest, viz. challenge.gov, and resulted in the development of vaccines, thanks in large part to the work of Michael Kremer.^* In 2001 Brad DeLong and Larry Summers wrote:

New institutions and new kinds of institutions -- perhaps even some that have been tried before, like the French government's purchase and placing in the public domain of the first photographic patents in the early nineteenth century (see Kremer (1998)) -- may well be necessary to achieve the fourfold objectives of (a) price equal to marginal cost, (b) entrepreneurial energy, (c) accelerating the cumulative process of research, and (d) providing appropriate financial incentives for research and development. The work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer (1998, 2000), both with respect to the possibility of public purchase of patents at auction and of shifting some public research and development funding from effort-oriented to result-oriented processes (that is, holding contests for private companies to develop vaccines instead of funding research directly), is especially intriguing in its attempts to develop institutions that have all the advantages of market competition, natural monopoly, and public provision.

cf. work being done by E. Glen Weyl (Hermann was his great uncle) --- ^*coincidentally there's a prize named after another Kremer