Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog 0. Laughing Squid swissmiss juan freire BIBLIA ILUSTRADA Seth's Blog We still teach a lot of myths in the intro to economics course, myths that spill over to conventional wisdom. Human beings make rational decisions in our considered long-term best interest. Actually, behavioral economics shows us that people almost never do this. Our decision-making systems are unpredictable, buggy and often wrong. We are easily distracted, and even more easily conned. Every time we assume that people are profit-seeking, independent, rational actors, we've made a mistake. The free market is free. The free market only works because it has boundaries, rules and methods of enforcement. Profit is a good way to demonstrate the creation of value. In fact, it's a pretty lousy method. Profit is often a measure of short-term imbalances or pricing power, not value. I hope we can agree that a caring nurse in the pediatric oncology ward adds more value than a well-paid cosmetic plastic surgeon doing augmentations. The best way to measure value created is to measure value, not profit.
Geek Culture and The Joy of Tech: pretty much everything you've ever wanted. The Daily What deugarte.com Clay Shirky Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn’t a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III , a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3. The recording industry concluded this new audio format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD at the record store? If Napster had only been about free access, control of legal distribution of music would then have returned the record labels. How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? The story the recording industry used to tell us went something like this: “Hey kids, Alanis Morisette just recorded three kickin’ songs! But who faces that choice? But you know what?
Brain Pickings The Second Pass