Designing better futures

The Miral Scale: measuring the ideas in the heads of humanity and why Facebook is a 9.17

 

The Miral Scale is a way of measuring how many people in a given time in the human species share a collective concept or idea. As the world becomes more connected and shares experience the global concepts of hive mind and connected become more relevant. The social graph as expressed by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook is a concept of a floating social network, but hasn't been quantified or grounded.

The human experience is becoming a ever greater more about shared and linked experience. Concepts that reside in human consciousness have been referred to as Memes, a themetic expansion of the concept of the gene from biology, put forth by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene. Memes spread via culture and shared experience.

The Miral Scale = Memes * Humane species hive mind

When a virus spreads through a host species it is called viral. The concept of the miral scale is that memes spread through the human species and are said to be Miral. The Miral scale measures the number people who have a specific concept in their mind at a certain time.

Miral spread

meme concepts are granular and can be infinitely large, small or complex. They can be visual, audio, conceptual, tonal etc. The only important component is that a meme is present and can be expressed or experienced and therefore spread. Importantly a person may or may not have the consciousness of carrying the meme.

Meme

Memes can be described in simple or complex fashion. Red cube, cube and green cube are 3 different memes which may register with the viewer as unique. In the same way the exposure to Lima beans may be associated with a physical response associated with the visual que of a Lima bean. Thus the Lima Bean can be good, bad, recognized or un-recognized. This is an example of a compound meme.

Memetic concepts can link or radiate from a central concept in a infinite variety.

The Miral Scale

The Miral scale ranges from 0-10 and is logarithmic ranging from 0 to the number of conscious members of the species. Thus Miral scale ranking circa 2010 would look something like the following table:

Miral level	0.0		1.2		2.0	3.0	4.0	5.0	6.0		7.0	8.0	9.0	10.0
Meme carriers	0		7		68	680	6,800	68,000	680,000		6,800,000	68 million	680 million	6.8 billion

 

The Miral scale changes as a function of the size of the species. For example it is estimated that there were 1 billion people alive in 1800. Thus the high end of the scale 10.0 would have equated to 1 billion people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

A meme's impact on the Miral scale changes overtime

New concepts and ideas arrive, fads explode, old cultures and ways of thinking die with those cultures and people who carried them or are forgotten from living memory. Artifacts may bring them back.

Facebook supposedly has 500m members. If one assumes each is a unique person and that for every member of Facebook there is another person who is aware that Facebook is a website. Then there are an estimated 1 billion Facebook is a website meme carriers, putting Facebook at 9.17 on the Miral Scale. It is estimated 116 million people have registered for Friendster, assuming a 2:1 awareness to registration ratio gives it a Miral scale of 8.69. Assuming 200 Million MySpace registrations and a 2:1 awareness factor yields a Miral Scale rank of 8.77. Younger fast growing services such as Foursquare are estimated to have just north of 1 million users. Assuming a 2:1 awareness to user ration would give it a Miral scale rank of 6.47.

Service	Estimated users	Ratio of user:meme awareness	Miral scale
Facebook	500m	2:1	9.17
MySpace	200m	2:1	8.69
Friendster	116m	2:1	8.77
FourSquare	1	2:1	6.47

 

A brand is an example of commercial culture hacking to increase the brand's Miral Scale

It is easy to imagine that the biggest brands have some of the largest Miral scale rankings, Coke for example is almost a human universal in terms of its logo. Anthropologists and sociologists can point to a few human universals such as the relationship of mother, father etc. that may be titled differently but would be considered 9.99 on the Miral Scale as meme or concept held as human universals.

Memes, bits & pixels

Different technologies, cultural expressions, idioms, beliefs and traditions all rise and fall over time. Meme's can exist within or beyond a language construct, they can be experiential. For example various groups hearing a famous piece of music such as Beethoven's 9 symphony may have recall it and be able to distinguish it from other "classical" music, but may not be able to label it. Meme's transcend linguistic labels but are typically expressed using language. Written meme's or experiences can be exclusively shared within the domain of linguistic expression. Reading about a scene in the Harry Potter series can be considered distinct or related to the visual expression, depending on how one wishes to define the meme.

Memes work in a similar fashion to the concept of the Bit or pixel in computing. The bit or pixel is a finite and exact thing, which appears to have little value outside of a multitude of bits and pixels. Bits and pixels in context allow for a multitude of constructs and expressions. These absolute ideas such as bits, pixels and memes posses significant importance.

Memes are not static or absolute, but vary over time. The Miral scales ebbs and flows and may disappear altogether only to reappear via the experience or discovery of old cultural artifacts, new expressions or the synthesis of new ideas.

History is by definition the slowly fading memetic stream. History rediscovered rebirths old memes increasing the Miral scale.

MemeQ

The human mind being finite has a potential memetic carrying capacity which is probably a function of both the memory and the ability to synthesize and store memories dynamically in new contexts.

One could argue that there is probably a normative memetic carrying capacity similar to an IQ, a memeQ if you will that varies with developmental and physical potentials achieved.

Home Sapiens Sapiens HiveMind MemeQ

The concept of the Hive mind is referred to when sci-fi writers or others like to discuss a collective consciousness. Connectedness is assumed to have a lot to do with intelligence, but most cognitive scientists agree we are far away from a truly generalized theory of intelligence. The miral scale only indicates points of memetic awareness and nothing else.

That being said, If one assume the normative level of the memeQ to be set at 100 per individual, then the Species has a memeQ storage capacity of 100*6.8 billion or a hive mind capacity of 680 billion memeQ's in 2010. It can of course be argued the definition specious metric of memeQ is tautological, nonetheless it is a starting point for a debate.

There is no way to measure the memeQ of an individual at this point and no particular way to extract or relate it to other general theories of intelligence, memory, creativity or cognition in general.

MemeQ potentials

Intelligence like many human attributes is a genetic potential. That potential is realized within its range relative to the nutrition, education, support and even stimulus of the environment around in which the individual develops.

Lack of micro-nutrients such as iodine for example can lead to the loss of 10-15 IQ points. Growing up in a household with a smaller vocabulary has been shown to produce children who have smaller vocabularies. Why vocabulary size and intelligence aren't known to be correlated with memetic potential, it may be indicative of the fact that human miral capacity is potential itself which has a developmental range for each individual.

Why should anyone care about a Miral Scale or memetic potentials.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, if the Empires of the future are the empires of the mind, then understanding memetic spread and capacity within groups will be important. Marketing, education, culture, and even what some may consider the march of human progress is most likely about developing and honing the memetic potential of individuals and groups. Ignorance, unrealized capacity and lost opportunity at the individual level is more and more about lost opportunity for the group. The next great discovery in medicine, energy, law or culture is inevitably assumed to be greater when shared by everyone, understanding how memes spread, are managed and evolve will be one of the keys to the Empires of the present and the future.

Excel tool for expressing a Miral scale estimate.

Free Excel tool for calculating a meme score. Here is a free excel tool for converting a Miral rank to the number of people estimated to carry the meme.

 

 

 

 

 

TypePad & SixApart have become Evil, so I am moving on

Hi folks,  ever lose the data on your hard drive and have that, "Oh nooooo!" feeling.  Well TypePad, my blog providing service delivers that same feeling.  Over the last 4 years, I have written and created hundreds of posts with images, files and multi-media.  My blog is now here.

My blog is pure unabashed digital narcissism with typos and bad grammar thrown in at no extra charge.  Well I have decided to move my blog to Wordpress as it lets me keep and control my data.  As it stands now my old images and files are mostly trapped within TypePad and SixAparts servers.  I can pay a few hundred bucks to have someone extract and install them for me elsewhere, but I don't think that is worthwhile at this point.  So SixApart via TypePad, will extract another $50 from me.

SixApart, the company that offers TypePad, doesn't offer a full data export of your TypePad blog.  This is most likely a half assed strategy at client retention.  It worked, I am retained and renewing for another year, with my new blog pointing to your servers to pull out my old images. 

My only hope is that a few people considering TypePad as new customers will avoid it like the plague. Typepad and SixApart represent the old world of keeping control of users data with a, "we can get away with it, so why not." mentality which I can in no way support.

Keeping customers by locking them in is evil.  You will find that if you have to do that to protect your business, you don't really have a business, you are milking a dead cash cow, good luck with that folks.

To the folks at TypePad: a few years ago I met your management's Sr. team Andrew Anker and have followed Anil Dash's blog.  Mena Trott seems smart and cool. You seemed like real nice folks, but have become evil, so I am out of here.  I have run a software firm and was responsible for 30 people and know it is hard but if you can't do the right thing, you should probably be doing something else for living.

For those wishing to follow Designing Better Futures go here www.gogerty.com  RSS FEED where I will be posting new typos and fresh grammatical horrors in a more open environment.

Miniature faking. Making the real less so.

 
In our hyper real 1080p-3D 50mega pixel quest for reality, we assume that things are more accurate with more resolution etc.  Laser TV is going to produce 90% of the colors the human eye percieves, your best technology today delivers about 30%. 

However reality can sometimes by too garish and gory so it gets edited, distorted or disappears.  Here is an interesting technique that makes the real world look safer and under control.  Fascinating stuff with a technique called Tilt-shifting and Miniature faking.  check out the video.  More images and video at Twisted Sifter. 

The video below combined with Lo-Fi  deep house music in the background just makes sense.   Aesthetics in the 17th-20th century vacillated between the romanticized naturalism of an idylic countryside and the modern urban focus on humanities progress. 

Perhaps the future aesthetics pendulum will swing between ultra-hi res composed purity vs. the gritty complex authenticity of nature.  No change really, just new mediums delivering old messages.  Miniature faking seems somewhere inbetween :)  Recommended full screen viewing and check out MockMoons other work, very talented

miniature city 2 - featuring vividblaze - from mockmoon on Vimeo.

Latest details on residential Manhattan Real Estate. Uh oh!

 
 
I will let the pictures do the talking, fiscal reality meets physical realty.  My opinions on why this is happening and how much farther it could go.

Price declines 10-18%, Sales Declines of $+6 billion, listing discounts increasing to greater than +10%, average days on the market increasing over 175 days, you get the picture and with Job losses increasing from 6-10% the median income catchment area is declining, so the justifiable value (median income/media value ratio) has even more pressure on it. 

 The neighborhood details are in the Prudential report, and remember the numbers may be goosed to be positive considering the source.   Download Manhattan_10YR_2009

 

 
 

Does my Sr. compensation ratio look big in this....

Anthropomorphizing things is an innate human trait.  Here is a comic from the Abstruse Goose comic site.  If you liked math and science in school, you will probably enjoy Abstruse goose.

Lifestyle Arbitrage of the day $5 million in New York vs. France

The average townhouse in New York is now $5m.  Example to the left.

Here is a chateau in the Loire Valley in France for $5m, sounds like a fixer upper, but maybe a good project to hide out with during the recession. 

Description: built in 1897 for a French Viscount by the architect Albert Thomas (1847-1907). Located in the most wooded part of the Loire Valley called the Sologne, 120 miles from Paris by motorway A10/A71.

Directly inspired by the grandeur of Versailles , the chateau overlooks the Sologne forests and its private park of 41 hectares (103 acres) in the French style. There is a 1 mile driveway, courtyard, terraced parterres and a formal basin with monumental statues. Excellent privacy and structural condition.
There is about 36,000 square feet of living space, partially renovated, habitable and decorated. Very high ceilings and huge spaces: hall of 1,700 square feet with monumental staircase, great drawing room of 1,800 square feet…etc

Symmetrical outbuildings with stables, orangery, chapel, gate house and further potential. Incredibly prestigious palace, now listed as Historic Monument (Grade 2). more pictures here

 Here is a guidebook on the chateaux lifestyle.
 

 

Source: For those shopping for Chateaux across europe.

Buy now before those pesky euro's and dollars get deflated away.

Reality hacking with Comedy at Ikea

Commercial space is designed for dedicated functions and proscribed roles and behavior codes as consumer or commercial actor (greeter/barista/ guard etc.).  Starbucks recognized the need for a social space and focused on making a comfortable 3rd place away from work and home.  Here is a Comedy shot on location secretly inside IKEA, it is called IKEA Heights.  It is funny because we have all been in IKEA and identify with bits of the physical narrative.  It is also funny, because it misuses the designed role of the shared social space, treating IKEA like a giant dollhouse/movie set. 

With the commercial property bubble bursting ever faster, creating uses for commercial spaces is needed more than ever and of course a sense of humor helps.

Ikea Heights - Episode 7 from DaveAOK on Vimeo.

Chanos on China & Krugman on Asia 1994 & USSR 1960

Arguably the world's most successful and well known short seller, Jim Chanos has some strong opinions on China's urban real estate bubble.  Regardless of your opinion on the matter, his debate and argument is worthwhile watching in regards to macro China.  In regards to China, I have deep concerns and am nervous about the global ramifications of a half awakened giant stumbling.

This video has poor audio and lasts an hour but provides insight into the thought process of short specialists thinking processes, a useful bit of education.

98% of the time the average Western person can ignore sovereign debt and the Chinese economies.  That may not be true in the near future. 

In the video Chanos says the best essay he has ever read on emerging markets is by Paul Krugman written in 1994 before the Thai Bahtulism etc. unfolded in 1997.  Regardless of your opinion on Krugman, his thoughts in this "The myth of Asia's Miracle, a fable" are worth weighing in the current context.  The opening of Krugman's paper:

Once upon a time, Western opinion leaders found themselves both impressed and frightened by the extraordinary growth rates achieved by a set of Eastern economies. Although those economies were still substantially poorer and smaller than those of the West, the speed with which they had transformed themselves from peasant societies into industrial powerhouses, their continuing ability to achieve growth rates several times higher than the advanced nations, and their increasing ability to challenge or even surpass American and European technology in certain areas seemed to call into question the dominance not only of Western power but of Western ideology. The leaders of those nations did not share our faith in free markets or unlimited civil liberties. They asserted with increasing self-confidence that their system was superior: societies that accepted strong, even authoritarian governments and were willing to limit individual liberties in the interest of the common good, take charge of their economies, and sacrifice short-run consumer interests for the sake of long-run growth would eventually outperform the increasingly chaotic societies of the West. And a growing minority of Western intellectuals agreed.

The gap between Western and Eastern economic performance eventually became a political issue. The Democrats recaptured the White House under the leadership of a young, energetic new president who pledged to "get the country moving again--a pledge that, to him and his closest advisers, meant accelerating America's economic growth to meet the Eastern challenge.

The time, of course, was the early 1960s. The dynamic young president was John F. Kennedy. The technological feats that so alarmed the West were the launch of Sputnik and the early Soviet lead in space. And the rapidly growing Eastern economies were those of the Soviet Union and its satellite nations.....read more

information is life: healthcare 2.0

I have a fraternity brother who is slowly losing his children to a rare neurodegenerative disease called Battens syndrome.  He and his wife are watching their 5 year old son fade before there eyes.  One of their twin daughters will go through the same process.  They are doing everything they can. 

If you know someone in such a situation here is a video explaining an amazing example of open source software for collaboration to discover better therapies and solutions.  This is insight into open medicine that lets everyone help is a fascinating example of well thought out design, information sharing and participation that may improve many lives.

 Imagine what will happen in the very near future when geneology sites with millions of people's profiles (see here) potentially start allowing the uploading and cross posting of raw DNA data while other build tools to study phenotypic expressions of genetic potentials.

The technology is here now and the cost points and pieces are all falling into place.  Open genomic posting and analysis in 3-5 years (800-1,200 days) will be an incredibly impactful business.

Gene impact beats i-pad in the long run

Shocker folks, the i-pad will grow in popularity, but won't change cultural institutions, values or belief systems much.

Gene testing and diagnostics will change cultural institutions, values and belief systems.  These are some old gene chips to the left.  I used to help run a project that played around with these. 

A firm called Counsyl is releasing a new chip that tests for 100 genetic related dis-orders.  This $700-800 chip will allow couples to determine the likelihood of a common or rare dis-order being passed down.

Counsyl isn't really that big a piece of news for those in the know.  There are probably hundreds if not thousands of the 23,000 listed syndromes that will show a genetic pre-cursor and or later deterministic environmental factor. 

The cost performance curve of sequencing which shames moore's law, means that a multi-hundred million dollar sequencing project in 2002 is now about $4,000. Nature Article: The changing economics of DNA synthesis.

You, your spouse, kids etc. will most likely be able to be sequenced for less than a $1,000 in 2-3 years.  If you want to understand how fast this world is looming, check out the  Carlson curves on the right hand side of Rob Carlsons page, they are the Moore's law of genetics.  There will be an ecosystem of multi-billion dollar service providers in this space in 5-7 years.

I bet that in 10 years sequencing of the flora in the gut will be as common as in-vivo protein analysis.  Trivia point: for every one "human cell" in your body there are 10 bacteria, they are just significantly smaller.  We are all walking and talking microbial ecosystems.

Counsyl has put 100 diagnostic tests on a chip.  In a few months, quarters etc. you will most likely see firms put thousands of tests on a chip while the price point stays about the same.  The information flood will be huge, the social impact even larger.

The true impact of any technology is the deeper philosophical situations that are opened up.  Rapid transport, steamships, trains, jets all shrank the world and made us all more neighborly or warly.  The internet mixed up our ideas and concepts of culture and boundaries, etc.

Genes let us ask: who am I? where did I come from? How long will I be here and what will my offspring be like.  The answers will be crude and very fuzzy ripe for mis-interpretation and mischief.  Genetics is accurate, phenotypic outcomes are fuzzy as they depend on lots of variables.

Quiztime involving the simple 100 test from Counsyl:

1. When should a couple take a genetic test, before/after marriage, dating, never etc.?
2. If you don't take the test and something occurs with your child, would you still feel OK about your choice?
3. What are the social implications for access to the test.  Should it be made available to everyone?
4. At what age should someone be aware of their genetic risk or opportunity profile (adulthood), sexual maturity?
5. If you take the test, does you have an obligation to share information with siblings who don't take the test but may be considering having a child and at risk?

The genee (sic) is coming out of the bottle folks and is faster than you can imagine.  Forget hacking your i-pad to support flash, and think about hacking your genes.  more on genes here just scroll down.

Checklists, hedge funds and human behaviour

Checklists are not sexy, but their results are.  I just finished the Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.  I am sold and you should be as well. Checklists save lives, make money and make life less stressful.

Outperformance seems to be associated with repeat process and efficient group communication. Checklists allow for managing individual and team processes for better outcomes.  The book gives a great overview of how, where and for whom checklists work. How to design and apply a checklist for super-ordinate goals is an emerging science/art.

As a hedge fund guy and anthropologist, I am fascinated.  Checklist dynamics applied correctly could be a hugely important innovation in group dynamics and increasing human potential.  As a tool for facilitating group activity they appear to be incredibly effective.  Read the book to understand how they work.  It involves, group dynamics, social interactions, reducing cognitive load and a host of other things.

Checklists allow for efficiency of semi-structured tasks and better individual and group behaviour goal directed behaviour.  Effective checklists are finely tuned for effectiveness, brevity and looseness.  Looseness is required for creativity to come in.

Great design of a bridge, airplane, product or service comes from the understanding of a goal and the design problems constraints.  Checklists seem to work the same way but in a behavioural real time way.  By providing cognitive, behavioural and group constraints, individuals are freed to contribute more effectively when need be collaboratively. 

The Checklist manifesto is a great book and gripping read.  Converting process into gripping human drama is no easy feat, but this thing reads like an action movie.  My copy of this book is already on loan request to a friend who is a risk manager for multi-billion $ Fund of Funds.  

See and here a check list in action saving lives as Sully lands in the Hudson river and saves lives.  The video is a also described in the book.

Here is Mohnish Prabai's value investor checklist.  He only gives a bit away. 

How Mohnish Pabrai Uses Checklists

View more presentations from MShareS.

I am working on a Charlie Munger type approach to the investing problem.  Charlie preaches inversion as a way to solve problems.  So here is an inversion technique to build a value investing checklist, find some great sounding investments that failed or companies that disappeared from an industry and then list why they failed.   That causal list becomes your checklist.  You can start with firms or experiences that didn't work out.  After collecting data on 30-50 a few patterns should emerge.

Group the failure points or weaknesses into clusters, management, competitive loss, industry type etc.  you could even group according to Porters 5 forces etc.  That becomes your checklist.  Each industry has its own subtleties and the key is to identify the moats in each one and then run checklists around them. 

If you succeed you will end up with a few key rules or heuristics that makes groups able to makes decisions and act, faster, better and safer.  As a hedge fund you might try organizing into teams either by sector/asset class or specialty.  Instead of a beverage analyst, auto, tech etc. how about forensic accounting specialist, emerging threat specialist, regulatory specialist, organizational psychologist to analyze corporate culture etc. to analyze impact for a firm, oh and an anthropologist to capture major cultural trends that may be fading or rising.  This approach is probably cheaper and more effective than trying to find all those skills in one person.

One more note on process and safety: as many other have called for, I wish we had an economic/policy NTSB (national transportation safety board) to do post mortems on accidents.  Ideally the crash board, would have better resources than a university and be independent of industry and congress.  Seeing bubbles after the fact is easy, determining true causation isn't.

Microinsurance looks promising for millions

Leapfrog delivers financial products to the bottom of the pyramid.

Disclosure, Andy used to work in the same office I did in New York.  I think and hope he is onto something big.  Being able to believe, act and live long term are some of the keys to sustained development.  Insurance allows for more choice, innovation and freedom of action.

Andy's approach like micro-finance has many interesting innovations relevant to developing countries in delivery and management which make it feasible.  He uses existing social structures, cultural institutions and norms to help deliver and market the product.

Price innovation at a $1 price point is easy, understanding packaging, support and motivations and commercial viability at that price is the key to good service and product design.  Kind of an applied systems thinking anthropology approach to the problem, gotta like that.

How Bling works, as viewed by an anthropologist art historian.

Bling a word which may have been created as early as the 50's or 60's could be described as "the sound a diamond makes when sunlight hits it."  

In the oughties this evocative term, bling described the social display of wealth among young urban youth or Donald Trump.  The thesis being that by adorning oneself with the trappings of material wealth, the individual achieved ascribed status, power and socially desired attributes.  This is an example of positive materialism used for social standing. 

Bling eras captured in Painting & Architecture.

An old school architectural bling style is called rococo seen at the right.

In painting this can be seen in portraiture during different periods.  Check out Henry the Eighth.  The concept of lots of gold chains, furs and ladies is old school English bling.  Hint: the term family jewels is derived from the decorative codpiece.  I am surprised hip hop culture missed this trick.

Enter anti-bling

The pendulum swings as it always does in the other direction.  Humility, hardship and suffering and earned or achieved status become more important as indicative of value and self worth in the competition for social standing. 

The Monty Python video below illustrates this well.  Different cultures and sub-cultures handle the bling continuum differently.  One person's vulgar display is another's sense of self-expression.  Contemporary urban youth American culture refers to an anti-bling stance as "keepin' it real", which indicates a degree of authenticity derived from earned status and humility.

If you are a marketer or play a role in culture creation and facilitation, this is important.  Being from Iowa gives me a bit of an anti-bling stance and a bias for earned versus ascribed social status, keeping it real if you will.

MapAction part of the plumbing of Humanitarian Relief

Checklists, processes, communication, clean water, infrastructure.  Not sexy, but the plumbing of functioning society that makes it all happen. Check lists are coming back into vogue.  When that plumbing fails society can fail.  

Maps are infrastructure and vital for co-ordinated efforts.

When disaster hits MapAction Helps out with live updated maps for relief.  This resource will become ever more important with crowdsourcing.  Co-ordinating resources in disaster zones is a challenge and this looks like a very interesting NGO to watch and support.

I am a big map fan.  We keep a 1957 globe in our living room as it shows how things change over time but still stay the same. My wife and I have lived, traveled or worked in dozens of countries.

My own interest in geography aside from tourism and anthropology field adventures is about dead capital, which I would like to help get rid of. 

For those looking for adventure and charity, check out this rally from London to The Gambia in $250 cars.  The cars are auctioned off in The Gambia for Charity.

We were all signed up and ready for this adventure in 2003.  I was pouring over maps and guidebooks all jazzed. At the last minute we had to chicken out due to work (or lack thereof) issues.  I had camped and traveled for a few weeks in Morocco in college and spent a solid month in the Nigerian southern sub-Sahara desert and was excited.

This video kind of explains the drive across France, Spain, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania etc.:

My wife had a slightly rusted champagne colored 1983 BMW 3 series worth about $500.  It was already for a one way road trip to The Gambia in West Africa.  I was thrilled about the rally and will eventually do it.

During the summer of 03 the little car took us safely from London to Southern Sweden.  Sadly it was left behind in London when we came to the US.  It is now safely in the hands of a London based drummer.

Keynes vs. Hayek, throwdown video

Farnam street may be the best econoblog you never heard of.  Farnam Street's emphasis on common sense, ethics and behaviour is fantastic and highly educational.

Here is the latest find, see video below. For the record, I am a bigger fan of Hayek, but both are more schools of philosphy than arbiters of a true science. 

Keynes stimulus is nice in theory but most centralized distributions of wealth provide below reasonable returns due to political allocators at the switch. Keynes also appeals to the desire for control in crisis and the need to "do something".  This isn't necessarily a good thing.

Those interested in learning more about the Austrian school of thought might look at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

In some scenarios, stimuloss (sic) crowds out true economic actors.  This limits or damages true sustainable economic growth.  Govt' sponsored weeds crowding out true green shoots isn't a good thing.  

In truly dire cases politicians gain far too much power by controlloing and directing massive flows of wealth.  Japan and construction is a good case in point.  Check out the resource curse phenomenon in some countries to understand this feedback loop at its worst.

The homeless live in the subway and Manhattan in New York

Architecture for humanity is helping get volunteers for the 2010 New York Homeless Survey.  They still need volunteers in the Bronx and Staten Island.

Here are the results of previous surveys.  most of the homeless live in Manhattan and on the subways.

For those really interested in understanding homelessness: Here is an anthropology paper with a little story about drug dealers and homeless people mixing with anthropologists.  It shows that in these groups respect is earned and not given automatically. Accessing Distrustful Populations: Lessons from ethnographic research with the street homeless

 

For a specific study or female homelessness this book may provide insight.

Silent Sisters: An Ethnography Of Homeless Women

Has the US hit peak Tweet?

Oh no.  Peak tweet may have been hit in July in the US.  Data here.

For those of you trying to figure out what the hell twitter is, have a look here at some quick powerpoint summaries.

My own analysis of the social driver behind twitter is here. The video is very funny.

Property Rights index one key to a $9 trillion dead capital problem

I believe efficient and recognized property rights to land etc. are one of the keys to sustainable economic development.  Hernando de Soto  puts forth the case for property rights very well and has aided in the registration of hundreds of thousands if not million of homes that were dead capital.  I put de Soto as an odds on favorite for a Nobel in Economics or the peace prize in the coming years.  de Soto and Amartya Sen are truly interesting economists.

Dead Capital

To learn more about dead capital visit here.  There is $9 trillion sitting in developing countries ready to be used, by their own citizens.  That is development power waiting to be used.  No foreign aid required.

Here is the latest Property Rights index showing the world where it is easy to register property. There is a strong correlation between property rights and GDP/capita and most other development indicators.  Correlation isn't causation, but there is some compelling arguments here. 

International Property Rights Index is the publisher of the report.  The follow in the model of the Doing Business report put out by the World Bank, which is conceptually similar to Transparency International's work on corruption perceptions indexes.

Dead Capital fixes have a high ROI

For those interested in understanding big global problems and why property rights change has such a high ROI check out this book Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems.  It totally rocks.

IPRI and Transparency International do a lot of good and my hope is that the publications create social pressure for neighboring countries to compete positively to improve their relative metrics.  My only wish would be that the data was open and that the details of the process for property and business registration were public in a wiki format, so that wonks could start hacking and advocate positive changes.  We all need more live capital.

how an index and data help with these problems.

1. Raise awareness using simple comparative metrics
2. Allow for research econometric and social into outcomes costs and impacts
3. Raise competitive instinct in peer countries
4. Provide a public forum for reflection and desire for relative improvement over time

My own idea is to have a process based "workflow" wiki, to allow technocrats and field researchers and lay people to capture and study real world and best practices in property registration, transfer, recognition and dispute resolution. 

Best practice for property registration means, cheap, fast and law abiding. The idea is that various states and regions can study solutions can best practices can be deployed.  The federal system is predicated upon this idea for nations.  Info sharing between states, technocrats and individual actors could free up trillions for poor people.  Property Wiki is that idea.

James Montier: refreshingly honest about Finance as mostly junk

James Montier doesn't wear ties or suits etc.  He doesn't look smooth or polished.  He isn't the type you would put in a line-up of likely bankers, and yet he is refreshingly honest and knowledgeable about investing. 

Montier is an economist and global equity strategist at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, a German-owned investment bank. 

Montier has common sense and the ability to sum up some basic arguments very well.  If you are interested in investments, looking at an MBA etc. you find this video very interesting.

A Fast Company bio is here.

James also doesn't scream or yell seeking to be a personality, he just has a very honest voice.

There are some excellent points made in this video.  Well worth the time.

Some Quotes from the video:  "We intentionally screw people.  We have become marketing bitches.  Even Fama and French don't believe in the Efficient Market Hypothesis."

oh and Montier's synthesis of economic data with leading-edge behavioral research got him named London's "best global strategist" last year.

Checking in with Charlie Munger & the BBC

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner is another son of Omaha, who keeps things simple by reducing complexity via multiple mental frameworks.  Charlie is a little more direct in approach and less approachable to the layman, but understands key concepts such as feedback loops, linked systems and human behavioral biases.  He is also big on ethics.  I strongly recommend his book.

He isn't very big on the win at all costs attitude of the alpha male type.  He is also not very impressed with Wall Street.  Pretty interesting stuff from one of the world's best investors.