The research that Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer previewed for David Brooks has finally come out: Are High Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap? Evidence from a Social Experiment in Harlem. [Via: NBER]
It’s an experiment with a different way of telling stories. I think in it, you can see the germ of something quite interesting.
—Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations of The New York Times Company
So much of what you see online today is a reflection of the way it’s told in newspapers. They haven’t taken advantage of what the Web offers to tell news in a different way…This project is a pilot. The idea is to make improvements based on the feedback we receive, then make those tools more widely available…On the search side, there’s a single page to point to. Instead of thousands of links, there is a single point of reference. And that’s helpful for users as well…I think we would expect that different publishers would take it in a number of different directions
—Josh Cohen, business product manager for Google News
There’s been a series of steps to work with and mollify news publishers, to improve the P.R., and you can see the living page in that same vein
—Ken Doctor, a media analyst with the analysis firm Outsell
The culture of Google is a culture of engineers. We exist in different worlds…The idea is that users, news consumers, are interested in experiencing news in different ways, and it’s important for news organizations to be experimenting. . . . The question is, when you take the car out for a spin, what are the advantages?
—R.B. Brenner, deputy editor of The Post’s new Universal News Desk
Giant Pool of Money: TAL
Of course, if the government borrows to do so, the debt must eventually be repaid (or the interest on it must be paid forever). That fact has provoked strident protests about government “bankrupting our grandchildren.”
It’s an absurd complaint. Failure to stimulate the economy would mean a longer downturn. That, in turn, would mean longer stretches of reduced tax receipts, increased unemployment insurance payouts, and depressed private investment. The net result? Higher total public borrowing and a permanent decline in productivity compared with what we would have had under effective economic stimulus.
–Robert Frank, via Economic View: NYT
It is clearly a much better picture, and appears to be mostly genuine. It shows employers have come back so much and are starting to rehire.
You create this class of people who essentially become permanently unemployed and can’t get back in. You have people who have lost contact with the labor market, whose skills are not relevant for jobs for the future, who employers regard with skepticism because they have been out of work for so long.
—Nigel Gault, IHS
With firms seeing profits improving we’re starting to see a much brighter labor market. Confidence has been restored and firms now have started to redeploy their cash.
—Stefane Marion, chief economist at National Bank Financial in Montreal
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?
—Tony Judt, What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy: NYRB
But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform.
I’ve outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the “small pieces loosely joined” model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.
One of the points I’ve made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.
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