Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman of Freakonomics discuss the claims that piracy leads to $250 billion a year in loses and 750,000 American jobs lost:
The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”
And:
So what’s the real number? At this point, we simply don’t know. And this leads us to a second problem: one which is not so much about data, as about actual economic effects. There are certainly a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. It’s clear that, at least in some cases, piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction — for example, a person who would have bought the DVD of the new Kate Beckinsale vampire film (who is that, actually?) but instead downloads it for free on Bit Torrent. In other cases, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he downloads.
Do we count this latter category of downloads as “lost sales”? Not if we’re honest.
Emergent Futures Tumblelog
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January 5th 2012
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Amazon Kindle Book Alan Moore: No Straight Lines MUST READ
- TheFuturesAgency: Alan Moore: 6 challenges for organisations in a non-linear world (futureof.biz)
- My new book is out: The Future of Content (Kindle only, $3.90) (futureof.biz)
- Gerd Leonhard: Mission 2012 are Green Futures. (thefuturesagency.com)
- The Future of Digital - Eco NOT Ego (futureof.biz)
- Announcing my new Kindle book “The Future of Content” (mediafuturist.com)
- “This iPhone/iPod app is probably the best way to follow his work as it delivers pretty much his…” (futureof.biz)
This is a new, MUST-READ book by my colleague and friend Alan Moore. “In No Straight Lines, Alan Moore argues that we have reached the nadir of the adaptive range of our industrialised world. Now faced with an unsustainable trilemma of social, organisational and economic complexity, we have entered an era in which the rules we have previously organised our lives around no longer apply. Leaving us with both a design problem and a design challenge which we must urgently solve. By describing an entirely new way for true social, economic and organisational innovation to happen, No Straight Lines presents a revolutionary logic and an inspiring plea for a more human-centric world.
‘Alan Moore is a visionary, someone who takes concepts from many sources and detects the previously hidden relationship between them. He has a firm grasp of the changes which are reshaping our world, always pointing towards a more participatory, cooperative, reciprocal model of what our society might look like.’ Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School for Communication
‘Economic transactions and markets have warped perceptions to such a degree that most people fail to see what is important in life, even when it’s right in front of them. Alan Moore offers a vision that is at once more humane, more forward-thinking, and more realistic.’ Howard Rheingold, writer and critic
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Bijan Sabet: Some thoughts about Apple textbooks
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Much has been written about apple’s proprietary approach to the textbook business.
I think the critics have a point.
But there are three important things that apple is worth talking about and applauding
1. They have created the most useful and most successful tablet ever. Microsoft has been…
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Global Risks 2012 - Seventh Edition | World Economic Forum-Global Risks 2012 - Seventh Edition
Economic imbalances and social inequality risk reversing the gains of globalization, warns the World Economic Forum in its report Global Risks 2012. These are the findings of a survey of 469 experts and industry leaders, indicating a shift of concern from environmental risks to socioeconomic risks compared to a year ago. Respondents worry that further economic shocks and social upheaval could roll back the progress globalization has brought, and feel that the world’s institutions are ill-equipped to cope with today’s interconnected, rapidly evolving risks. The findings of the survey fed into an analysis of three major risk cases: Seeds of Dystopia; Unsafe Safeguards and the Dark Side of Connectivity. The report analyses the top 10 risks in five categories - economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological - and also highlights “X Factor” risks, the wild card threats which warrant more research, including a volcanic winter, cyber neotribalism and epigenetics, the risk that the way we live could have harmful, inheritable effects on our genes. Key crisis management lessons from Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters are highlighted in a special chapter.An interesting report that underlines the need to transform our society from an productivity optimizing hence brittle one to a resilient and adaptive society.
But for me this report also raise the need to again argue for a necessary analysis of what is going on and from which standpoint the discussions in Davos is held. One of the core issues underlying many of the problems and risks in this report is the structural transformation of the power and consequently governance, a lot due to the emergence of radically new communication capabilities. Because of that the platform from where this discussion is taking place is a completely different place in the power hierarchies than most of the participants think.
Underlying many of the risks in these lists we can trace the effects of a differently wired world i e an emerging bottom-up model of governance. From the Davos perspective i e the perspective from a traditional and hierarchical standpoint to much of what is going on is perceived as societal threats or risks to address, when in fact they are just threats to the traditional ways of governing! To be able to focus on the real risks and challenges in the world we must understand that a changing communication paradigm is NOT a risk to hedge for or a problem to solve. It is more like the paradigmatic shift when your life changes when you give birth your first child. It is not a problem to solve but rather a case when you mature and realize that the world doesn’t gravitate around you alone anymore, but around the new unit of the family, suddenly and magically appear. It is rather a new prerequisite that you have to come to turn with and understand how to relate to, and consequently adapt to in the best way you can, but not a problem to solve.
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Real Time Farms tells you exactly where your food came from | Grist
Real Time Farms is a “crowd-sourced online food guide” that tells you exactly where the meal on your plate came from.
As crazy as it sounds, our vision is to collectively document the whole food system.
That does sound crazy, but so does the notion that a bunch of volunteers would build the most comprehensive and frequently updated encyclopedia in human history. And that one seems to have worked out okay.
Real Time Farms is in its early days, so only a tiny fraction of restaurants, farmers markets, and their fans have imported data on where ingredients are sourced. It feels like the kind of thing that will require a really big technological solution at some point in the future, like DNA barcoding of food or super cheap RFID tracking of crops from field to fork. Or maybe just more of us moving to Portland.
Northwestern, IBM collaborate on business analytics courses - AnalyticBridge
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Northwestern University and IBM are collaborating on new business and technology curricula to help students gain the latest skills in business analytics. The new courses of study, Masters of Science degree programs with analytics concentrations in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Continuing Studies, will better prepare students and current professionals who are seeking new analytics skills for today’s competitive job market.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be a 24 percent increase in demand for professionals with management analysis skills over the next eight years. The need for this specialized talent is being fueled by an increased use of business analytics by companies to better understand the explosion of data generated online, via social networks and mobile devices, or through real time sensors. With so much data residing within, and shared across, these digital sources, organizations are seeking new ways to understand, measure, act and even predict outcomes based on customer and social sentiment.
The demand for new higher education programs such as those at Northwestern illustrates the evolution of analytics. Once considered an area of focus for technology majors, that has moved beyond computers science and is now a required competency across businesses from finance and IT to human resources and marketing.
Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit: Are we thinking about urban planning all wrong? - Slate Magazine
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Walker is my favorite transportation blogger. This is a review of his new book. Pretty good read.
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