Last year it was the suggestively posed chicken.
This year it's the turkey in a steam bath.
Tony Cencicola is the Walter Iooss of scantily clad poultry.
Next year, perhaps a turducken: a turkey, chicken, and duck clasping each other in a suggestive ménage à trois and making sexy duck faces at the camera? Can a duck make a duck face or is that a circular reference?
It may not seem like an honor to have a term like "cost disease" named after you, but William Baumol's new book The Cost Disease is one of the more concise, enlightening economics books I've read recently.
Baumol's thesis is that certain service sectors, most notably healtchare and education, are doomed to outpace inflation because they are so dependent on labor.
Is there hope for education costs coming down? Will Harvard and other universities with massive endowments decide to subsidize higher education? Unlikely. But disruption tends to not come from incumbents, so we wouldn't look there anyway.
Perhaps education cost disruption comes from something like online education. As Alex Tabarrok writes, online education gives teachers massive leverage.
In 2009, I gave a TED talk on the economics of growth. Since then my 15 minute talk has been watched nearly 700,000 times. That is far fewer views than the most-watched TED talk, Ken Robinson’s 2006 talk on how schools kill creativity, which has been watched some 26 million times. Nonetheless, the 15 minutes of teaching I did at TED dominates my entire teaching career: 700,000 views at 15 minutes each is equivalent to 175,000 student-hours of teaching, more than I have taught in my entire offline career.[1] Moreover, the ratio is likely to grow because my online views are increasing at a faster rate than my offline students.
Teaching students 30 at a time is expensive and becoming relatively more expensive. Teaching is becoming relatively more expensive for the same reason that butlers have become relatively more expensive–butler productivity increased more slowly than productivity in other fields, so wages for butlers rose even as their output stagnated; as a result, the opportunity cost of butlers increased. The productivity of teaching, measured in, say, kilobytes transmitted from teacher to student per unit of time, hasn’t increased much. As a result, the opportunity cost of teaching has increased, an example of what's known as Baumol’s cost disease. Teaching has remained economic only because the value of each kilobyte transmitted has increased due to discoveries in (some) other fields. Online education, however, dramatically increases the productivity of teaching. As my experience with TED indicates, it’s now possible for a single professor to teach more students in an afternoon than was previously possible in a lifetime.
I don't think online universities will ever adequately replace attending a university in person for certain things (socialization, live human feedback, and the signaling value of a degree from an actual university have tangible value), but I've taken several online courses and for certain subject matters they are more than adequate at transmitting knowledge.
Baumol argues that we shouldn't panic as much about the rising costs in healthcare and education because we're saving a lot of money in areas which aren't as dependent on labor, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take a hard look at how to keep the costs in both of those areas down.
In healthcare, consumers are so removed from the actual cost side of the equation that it doesn't function much like an efficient marketplace at all. I see the doctor, I pay my copay of $15, and then when the bill comes out I have no idea whether I was given a good deal or not, I just hope my insurance covers as much of it as possible.
As for the value of what I receive from the healthcare industry, it's extremely difficult to gauge. Early in life, it tends to be very binary what I want. Cure my sinus infection. Fix my broken leg. Reconstruct my ACL. At the end of my life, the value equation shifts dramatically; still difficult to value, but in a completely different way. How do you quantify the value of an additional month of life? An additional year? Three years? And can you assign the proper amount of credit to the physician for
One reason Baumol's Cost Disease is more prevalent than it would otherwise be is that wages tend to be sticky. This was hammered home recently in the story of Hostess, which, in the face of declining sales, asked their worker unions to accept pay cuts, which the unions refused. That the executives had awarded themselves pay raises or that the root of the issue is really that no one eats Ding Dongs and Twinkies anymore doesn't negate the point that wages rarely go down in the real world, as they might in a truly efficient marketplace. I've actually never been at a company where any employees were asked to take a pay cut. Generally companies just freeze the salary of low performers, and that's enough of a signal that folks move on.
I find new-fangled labor marketplaces like TaskRabbit and Zaarly intriguing mostly as economic experiments in true wage elasticity. Companies don't generally try to ask people to work for lower wages, that's not a good signal in the recruiting marketplace. Rather, they'll approach it by trying to squeeze more work out of people at the same salary, which is a more subtle approach.
Low end disruption n the tech labor marketplace can happen, though it's most likely if initiated by the laborers themselves. In practice we call these people interns.
I doubt banks rank highly on companies that consumers love to death, but one reason I really dislike banks is their use of all sorts of insidious hidden charges to turn a profit on consumers. What's worse is that most of these penalties are regressive taxes.
As this article notes, overdraft fees for checking accounts can quickly add up. Banks don't work hard to keep you from the mistakes that trigger these fees, but often banks will waive these fees if you keep a lot of money with them. Thus these taxes tend to be regressive in nature, hitting lower income people the most.
I dislike state lotteries for the same reason: the people who tend to play are poorer and uneducated. Say what you will about paternalism, but I don't respect companies that build their business on regressive taxes.
Say what you will about Twitter's recent moves, but if the tax they're going to impose on their users is advertising, at least it's one that seems to cost the users who can afford it the most. Look at the composition of those who ponied up $50 for an App.net account or $20 for a license for Tweetbot for Mac. They're largely early adopter tech geeks with enough disposable income to choose to opt out of Twitter's taxes on their user experience. Most other people are happy to pay with their attention and subject themselves to a more constrained set of options to use Twitter rather than pay with cash.
Personally, I hate ads, and much of advertising can cynically prey on human weaknesses in ways that are purposefully detrimental to their well-being. But tech geeks can be overly hard on ad-supported businesses in a way that shows a callous disregard for the consumer surplus that so many of them bring massive user bases. By the very nature of ad-supported businesses, they generally help much larger groups of users than paid businesses.
Some of the Zynga games, like Farmville, seem to skirt dangerously close to being regressive taxes. Free to play, they attract many users who wouldn't pay for a game up front. After the players are trapped, the game starts offering up enticements that cost money. And even if you don't pay up for those, you have to pay with hours of your attention. Enjoyable hours, perhaps, but when I hear about people waking up in the middle of the night to milk virtual cows, or whatever it is people do in those games, alarm bells go off over who is paying what price.
[Somewhat related: in sports, many have made very reasonable arguments for legalizing the use of the safest performance enhancing substances. After all, the cost of hunting down retired athletes like Bonds, Clemens, and Armstrong cost over a hundred million dollars of taxpayer money, and the social benefit of them was arguable. But one argument for continuing to keep those substances out of sports is their super high cost. If they are essential to winning in sports, and with the lottery-like payouts inherent to many of them, allowing them just shuts lower income folk out of competing at the highest levels. Being a professional athlete is expensive enough as it is.]
One very simple way we tech geeks can do some social good is by assessing the social impact of the products and services we use. You generally don't see that dimension considered in any of the traditional review of tech products from the Mossbergs and Pogues and everyone else (myself included) because we're so accustomed to measuring them on dimensions like speed, resolution, usability, and things like that.
The desire to do good and the profit imperative are uneasy bedfellows.
Wow, I haven't read an article by Jakob Nielsen since my early days at Amazon, when he was one of the few usability gurus of any note. Some senior folks at Amazon held him in high regard so I often received links to his articles from them.
As more and more designers made their voices heard online and as user interface design became an exalted art form, one to which companies ascribed serious competitive advantage, I lost track of Nielsen. Many designers wrote harsh rebukes of his ideas, some legitimate, others seemingly out of glee in taking down the guy with the biggest name at the time.
I stopped reading his articles one day and just never started up again as happens with so many sites. He isn't linked or mentioned much among people I read and follow online, and in the attention economy, a lack of people distributing your ideas leaves you out beyond even the margins.
But a few people have linked to Nielsen's latest article about Windows 8 usability, and it makes some good points about Windows 8's usability shortcomings, one of which I noted before from my 30 minutes playing with a Surface. Nielsen points out some fundamental problems with the Metro interface style.
As a footnote, and to anticipate any arguments that he's a Mac zealot, Nielsen notes that he switched from Mac to using Windows years ago and is still using Windows 7.
I'll have to flip through a few of the articles he's written in the years I stopped following him, if for nothing else than for nostalgia's sake. Considering how much sites have evolved over the years, his site still looks exactly the same as I remember it, a fair representation of his design philosophy: usable if a bit plain or even ugly.
Chris Brown does a great job breaking down Chip Kelly's vaunted Oregon spread offense. Of course I'll be rooting for Stanford this Saturday night in their matchup against Oregon, but I confess to a huge crush on Kelly's spread-offense. Football strategy innovation is rarer than you'd expect given the huge financial incentives to winning, but every so often, someone like a Dick Lebeau or a Bill Walsh comes along and comes up with something new, like the zone blitz or the West Coast offense, and it's a beautiful thing.
Hear Kelly explain his spread-offense, the logic seems elegantly simple.
At its most fundamental, Kelly's system is a carefully organized, carefully practiced method for forcing defenses to defend the whole field, and then exploiting those areas left exposed. And the first tool Kelly uses is a surprising one: math.
"If there are two high safeties [i.e., players responsible for deep pass defense], mathematically there can only be five defenders in the box. With one high safety, there can be six in the box. If there is no high safety, there can be seven in the box," Kelly explained at the 2011 spring Nike Coach of the Year Clinic. The easiest case is if the defense plays with two deep defenders: "With two high safeties, we should run the ball most of the time. We have five blockers and they have five defenders."
When a team brings that extra defender into the box, the calculus for the offense changes. "If the defense has one high safety and six defenders in the box, the quarterback has to be involved in the play," Kelly explained. "He has to read one of the defenders, in effect blocking him. We can block five defenders and read the sixth one." Marcus Mariota, Oregon's dynamic freshman quarterback, has been an excellent blocker without hitting anyone at all.
Football is really simple, in some ways. On offense, the advantage is that they know what play is going to be run and the defense doesn't. But it's somewhat offset by the fact that the offense has one player, the quarterback, who isn't blocking or running a route, giving the defense one extra person to defend (this is one reason why quarterbacks that can run, like Michael Vick or RGIII, are so dangerous; they force the defense to assign at least one defender to shadow the QB, neutralizing that man advantage).
Kelly's spread-offense tries to neutralize the man disadvantage by putting the offense in situations that give them as few defenders to manage as possible, analogous to a power play in hockey. And by playing fast, like no huddle offenses in the pros, they prevent defenses from swapping in personnel for specific packages, further putting the defense at a disadvantage.
I, for one, hope Kelly gets a long, extended look in the NFL, enough time to try to bring some of that innovation to the pro grame.