Let’s get this straight – I don’t have anything  against Google any more than I do any other company. But there are times when it just goes out of its way to be a pretentious prat. Today is such a day.

Here is Google’s unbelievable official response to the Microsoft attempt to buy Yahoo!  How about this for a paragraph:

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and
illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the
Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently
sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its
dominance into new, adjacent markets.

David Drummond (Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer) talks about two principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture.

The beauty of this stance is that you can play the openness and innovation off against each other. Google’s important software is just as proprietary, closed source, and hidden as that of Microsoft – in fact more so because M$ has shared source agreements with many companies while Google’s … Continue reading

Thanks to Dave for seeing an article I missed in the paper this morning.

Although lots of people talk about how the fragmenting of mass culture is changing, it turns out no one is actually doing anything about it, so we end up with influential but sloppy books based on an anecdote, a hunch, and a whistle.

Now we have the Canadian Heritage-commissioned Book Retail Sector in Canada report about the book market in Canada. Here are some numbers:

• The overall trend is "more sales for fewer books.”
• Number of new titles from Canadian publishers: 12,000 in 1998 to 17,000 in 2004 (40% growth).
• Total unit sales over the same period: up only 11%.
• As a result "both the average sales per title in Canada and the average print runs in many title categories have been falling in recent years"
• Of the 675,000 titles available in in Canada in 2006, 45% did not sell a single copy.
• 10,000 titles (2.7%) accounted for 64% of unit sales.
• 500 titles (less than 0.1%) accounted for 22% of unit sales.
• In 2006 Indigo accounted for 44% of domestic book sales; independent bookstores 20%, non-traditional retail … Continue reading
  

Bad news for Yochai Benkler. In his celebration of the Internet, The Wealth of Networks, Benkler writes this (p 277):

A nine-year-old girl searching Google for Barbie will quite quickly find links to AdiosBarbie.com, to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), and to other, similarly critical sites interspersed among those dedicated to selling and playing with the doll. The contested nature of the doll becomes publicly and everywhere apparent, liberated from the confines of feminist-criticism symposia and undergraduate courses. This simple Web search represents both of the core contributions of the networked information economy. First, from the perspective of the searching girl, it represents a new transparency of cultural symbols. Second, from the perspective of the participants in AdiosBarbie or the BLO, the girl's use of their site completes their own quest to participate in making the cultural meaning of Barbie. The networked information environment provides an outlet for contrary expression and a medium for shaking what we accept as cultural baseline assumptions. Its radically decentralized production modes provide greater freedom to participate effectively in defining the cultural symbols of our day. These characteristics make the networked environment attractive from the perspectives of both personal freedom of expression and an … Continue reading

The other day I mentioned that I had a posting up at the Relentlessly Progressive Economics blog. For all those who wanted to read the piece, but just couldn’t bring themselves to click the link, here is that posting.

The recent PFE blog post by Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson is a wholesome read. It reminds us that markets and private enterprise deserve less credit than they receive for our current prosperity, such as it is; it lays out the contribution of the state to innovation; it reminds us that unregulated markets are hazardous and often crooked; and it points out that cornerstone social democratic policies such as a healthy minimum wage don’t have the dire side effects conservative economics would have us believe they do.

And yet it makes depressing reading.

I’m not here to pick a fight with Chernomas and Hudson (it was a short excerpt from a bigger piece, after all), but it touched a nerve because for all my adult life (ie since the late ’70s) I’ve been reading the same defensive tone from left-wing economists and after thirty years it’s getting a … Continue reading

Despite not being an economist, I’m a member of the Progressive Economics Forum. Today I have a post up at their Relentlessly Progressive Economics blog (RPE), courtesy of Marc Lee, entitled "Beyond Defending the State".

RPE has a lot of good material despite its inclusion of my post, with regular contributors including economists at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the CAW/TCA, and the CLC among others.

Continue reading

Four related observations:

• Kieran Healy writes that rates of organ donation depend less on "this or that policy in general" (markets vs donations, presumed consent vs. informed consent) than on the organizational underpinnings of the procurement system. "Reform of the rules governing consent is often accompanied by an overhaul and improvement of the logistical system, and it is this—not the letter of the law—that makes a difference. Cadaveric organ procurement is an intense, time-sensitive and very fluid process that requires a great deal of co-ordination and management. Countries that invest in that layer of the system do better than others, regardless of the rules about presumed and informed consent."
• Dani Rodrik writes that the level of economic growth among underdeveloped countries depends on adopting a "second-best mindset". It is wrong to presume, as the IMF does, that "it is possible to determine a unique set of appropriate institutional arrangements ex ante and [view] convergence towards those arrangements as inherently desirable" or that there is a single set of "best practices" that, so long as you follow them as closely as you can, will lead to success. Instead, things … Continue reading