On Being "Wrong" on Iraq. This is not another article about Christopher Hitchens. This may come as something of a relief, given the spilling of ink occasioned by Hitchens’ untimely death last week, with Neal Pollock’s fine parody hopefully bringing this outpouring to an end. After an initial set of hagiographies, it was encouraging to see a number of pieces reminding readers of Hitchens’ role in forcefully and bloodthirstily advocating for the war on Iraq, and for the “war on terror” more generally, as part of a deeply racist and Islamophobic current in his work over the past decade (or more). What has struck me in the articles that have followed, both those that praise and those that condemn Hitchens’ work, is the recurring use of a phrase to describe Hitchens’ advocacy on behalf of the invasion and occupation of Iraq: he was, we are told by the most perceptive commentators on his work, “wrong on Iraq.”
The existence of this too-easy conscience is especially apparent when it comes to Iraq. By The Numbers: Today's Military. Aggregation dynamics. The social world starts with social individuals. So how do we get more complex social outcomes out of the actions and thoughts of independent individuals? How do the actions and thoughts of individuals aggregate into larger social happenings? How did the various religious, political, and relational attitudes of rural Kenyans aggregate to widespread ethnic violence a few years ago?
What sorts of conditions lead to interactions that bring about unexpected outcomes? And, of course, how do larger social happenings impinge upon individuals, leading to characteristic kinds of socialized behavior? These are questions I've usually addressed from the other angle -- the "dis-aggregation" angle. Here are some examples of the kinds of happenings and situations that we might be interested in: Some social outcomes are essentially agglomerative. Second, some outcomes are the result of strategic behavior by a number of individuals. . , Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior ). Tim Harford - Failure: It’s everywhere. I wrote this essay for the Freakonomics blog. In 1982, the management consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman published In Search of Excellence, a colossally popular business title.
The book aimed to learn lessons from the world’s best companies, and Peters and Waterman produced a list of 43. But just a couple of years after In Search of Excellence had been published, BusinessWeek ran a cover story with the simple title: “Oops! Who’s Excellent Now?” My aim isn’t to mock Peters and Waterman, but to point out that the rise and fall of business models is an unavoidable part of economic growth.
The curious thing is that these individual failures need not be a problem for the economy as a whole. A more rigorous attempt to look at this question, a study by Kathy Fogel, Randall Morck,and Bernard Yeung, found statistical evidence that economies with more churn in the corporate sector also had faster economic growth. I’m not sure I’d blame the politicians. Podcasts » Glenn Greenwald, Presentation, 8 March 2011 – Video. LinkedIn Weak Links. “I know a guy...” Is LinkedIn anything more than a resume warehouse? Is it simply a web-based Rolodex to make it easier to stay up with your business contacts?
I don't know the business model for the company, and don't have any basis to comment on its long-term prospects, but in a somewhat stream-of-conciousness mode, I hear the “linked” in LinkedIn, and it starts me thinking about network theory, and the place LinkedIn most naturally fills in that space, which is to establish weak links. In partiular, LinkedIn is an application of a theory the sociologist Mark Granovetter proposed in a 1973 paper. Granovetter looked at how job seekers used their social connections in their search. The reason these second-order relationships, which he calls weak ties and which network theory refers to as weak links, are so valuable in the job search is that they have information that is outside the sphere of the tighter circle of friends.
Networks, Weak Links, and the Evolution of Society. Marginal Revolution — Small steps toward a much better world. MegaUpload / Universal. Who owns what ? First Monday. Swift.