Rav Casley Gera

It’s often said that Africa is too big to think about as a single place, and instead of ‘Africa’ we should talk about ‘the Africas’ or Les Afriques. I was reminded of this reading Decca Aitkenhead’s thoroughly enjoyable piece on Poor Economics co-author Abhijit Banerjee:

Their overwhelming message is that there is no Big Idea or golden bullet, so we should stop thinking about “Aid”, and start thinking about “aid”.

Surely even ‘aids’? Ah. Right.

Jason Pontin, editor of Technology Review, wrote an interesting piece a couple of months ago (you may have spotted that I’m having a clearout) on the relative failure of iPad-specific versions of magazines, arguing that the future still lies in web-based editions. It’s pretty convincing - TR sold just 353 iPad app subscriptions, while the Financial Times’ decision to shutter its iPad app in favour of a mobile-friendly, paywalled website has by all accounts paid dividends. It’s well worth a read, but one particular detail caught my eye:

There were other difficulties. It turned out that it wasn’t at all simple to adapt print publications to apps. A large part of the problem was the ratio of the tablets: they possessed both a “portrait” (vertical) and “landscape” (horizontal) view, depending on how the user held the device. Then, too, the screens of smart phones were much smaller than those of tablets. Absurdly, many publishers ended up producing six different versions of an editorial product: a print publication, a conventional digital replica for Web browsers and proprietary software, a digital replica for landscape viewing on tablets, something that was not quite a digital replica for portrait viewing on tablets, a kind of hack for smart phones, and ordinary HTML pages for their websites.

Yeesh. And this is just dealing with the iPhone and iPad, each of which comes in just one size. Imagine adding into the mix the wild array of Android devices, which come in all shapes and sizes. Windows 8 devices will probably do the same.

If Pontin is right, it’s good in many ways for consumers: websites, even paywalled, are likely to offer better value than app-based subscriptions subject to Apple’s 30% cut. But I do think something is lost in translation. iPad magazines weren’t supposed to just enable magazines to make money again, they were supposed to bring back the magazine experience, too: visually rich, deeply designed, each double-page spread a minor adventure of layout. As someone who’s always enjoyed that aspect of magazines and finds the average news website painfully dull and poorly-designed I fret about losing that.

Hopefully as things evolve and HTML becomes more powerful, designers will get the hang of making tablet- and phone-friendly websites that can be as richly and flexibly designed as ink on paper.

Wired magazine’s profile of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, from last year is full of interesting nuggets. In a time when much the focus of the tech world is, thanks to Apple, on high-margin products, Bezos - now effectively a hardware vendor thanks to the Kindle, Kindle Fire and rumoured upcoming smartphone - is unapologetic about his company’s commitment to high-volume, low-margin business.

There are two ways to build a successful company. One is to work very, very hard to convince customers to pay high margins. The other is to work very, very hard to be able to afford to offer customers low margins. They both work. We’re firmly in the second camp.

I also really like his approach to customer service. Anyone who’s had a problem with a Kindle will know that Amazon’s customer helpers are pretty responsive and helpful. But Bezos maintains the company sees any customer enquiry as a failure:

Our version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants.

Whatever you think of Amazon - and it may or may not be the killer of the independent bookshop and god knows what else - Bezos is a very interesting, and increasingly influential, chap.

Adam Gopnik floored me a couple of months ago with this piece arguing that the popularity of Mad Men is symptomatic of a general current obsession with the 60s:

It seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past.

Gopnik goes on to list a few wide-ranging, but slightly unconvincing, cases: a supposed 1960s dalliance with the 20s, as evidenced by music-hall tributes like the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four”; the 70s indulged in Depression obsession, with films like The Sting; the eighties harked back to the Second World War with films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, while - and this is where Gopnik really has to stretch - the 90s’ love affair with the 50s shows in the revival of Converse All-Stars and the fact that Will Smith wore a skinny tie in Men in Black.

The causal force behind this cycle of nostalgia, Gopnik explains, is the childhood nostalgia of fortysomething TV and movie executives.

What drives the cycle isn’t, in the first instance, the people watching and listening; it’s the producers who help create and nurture the preferred past and then push their work on the audience. Though pop culture is most often performed by the young, the directors and programmers and gatekeepers—the suits who control and create its conditions, who make the calls and choose the players—are, and always have been, largely forty-somethings, and the four-decade interval brings us to a period just before the forty-something was born. Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories.

What left me so flabbergasted about this is that Gopnik is both exactly right and exactly wrong. There is a nostalgia cycle driven by the whims of fortysomething TV and movie execs; but it’s not for forty years previous, but thirty.

Since at least the 1980s, the primary focus of nostalgia has always been three decades ago. In the 80s, the 50s were far more a stylistic influence than the 1940s. Think of Levi’s Norman Rockwell-like TV ads with their early Sam Cooke soundtracks. Stonewash denim. The pastel-shaded, wide-lapel styles of the B52s and late Talking Heads. Stand by Me. Back to the Future, for Christ’s sake. Think, in fact, of Converse All-Stars: that revival began well before the Berlin Wall fell.

In the 1990s, pop culture was heartily obsessed with the 1960s. Remember that interminable period when the Anthology series was released and it seemed that, in the words of one magazine I read at the time, “the remainder of this decade has been legally handed over to the Beatles”? At the cinema, there was Austin Powers and the revival of James Bond; in music, the 60s were inescapable. Gopnik cites Arctic Monkeys as evidence of the noughties’ 60s adoration, but what about Blur, Oasis, and other Beatles-obsessed 90s bands literally too numerous to list?

The noughties, I’ll admit, were rather all over the place; it does seem as if the greater cultural complexity allowed by the shift of culture from mass platforms like TV to customisable tools like the internet will undermine this trend somewhat. But even so, a thorough thread of 70s revival ran through the noughties - think of The Strokes, skinny jeans and That 70s Show. (Towards the end of the decade, recession, energy crisis and a pervading sense of general decline also helped conjure up that dreary decade.)

And the current decade, whatever we end up calling it, has been thoroughly 80s-obsessed. Shops are full of neon, leopard-print and tribal patterns; shoulder pads, leg-warmers and even the moustache have seen a revival. Synths are unavoidable across the pop music world, while our cinemas have seen the Transformers series (which began last decade; the 80s revival did arrive ahead of schedule), The A Team, and Super 8, a film openly designed in tribute to Spielberg’s early-80s heyday.

Why thirty years ago, then, and not forty? It’s true that cultural production is dominated by men (and it is mostly men) in their forties. But the idea that people primarily look back to the period just before they were born in transparently hokum. As someone born in 1980, I don’t look back to the age of Star Wars; my older brother, who was actually alive when it came out, does. I look back to the time of Transformers, Action Force and super Nintendo; sometimes to the height of Blur-Oasis rivalry and Jarvis Cocker’s Brit Awards tomfoolery. One friend my age tells me one of his strongest first cultural memories is Suede playing the Brits in 1992. We’re nostalgic, in other words, primarily for a time between the ages of about 6 and 16; childhood, as it’s also known. When we’re married and settled and in control of a major movie studio, it’s to that time that we look back, not some imagined ‘edenic’ period just around our birth.

Or as Stand By Me - a movie set in the 50s and directed in the mid-80s by Rob Reiner, then in his mid-40s - puts it: “I never really had any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve.”

McKinsey Global Institute:

Some doubt whether productivity can really help return the United States back to economic health. Naysayers argue that the U.S. productivity engine is running out of steam anyway. Others yet worry that productivity is little more than business-speak for job cuts. They point to the period since 2000, during which sectors that saw the largest productivity gains —computers, electronics, and manufacturing — also lost jobs. Still others see China’s pursuit of higher technology manufacturing as a sign of pending U.S. decline.

The numbers tell a different story, however. Since 1929, the United States has recorded simultaneous increases in both productivity and employment every ten-year rolling period except one, research from the MGI report finds. Even on a rolling annual basis, productivity and jobs have grown in tandem the majority of the time. In anything but the short term, it is a fallacy to suggest that there is a trade-off between productivity and jobs.

One reason is that productivity has two components: efficiency and innovation. Getting new, faster computers or organizing production to minimize waste are examples of the first; building better, higher quality products or creating new services are examples of the second. Both types of productivity gains can lead to higher employment when the savings are put to work elsewhere in the economy. In the 1990s, for example, the United States saw productivity growth from both efficiency and innovation, and unemployment hovered below 6 percent. This is a broad balance to which it now needs to return.

It occurs to me that the Republicans’ focus on tax and ‘red tape’ puts them on the ‘efficiency’ side of this coin, Obama’s on green jobs and science on the ‘innovation’ side. Combine that with Romney’s association in the public mind with the worst aspect of efficiency - job cuts - and you’ve got a strong campaign message.

David Carr sounds characteristically sensible on the topic of WikiLeaks in a recent interview on the tech website The Verge:

There’s never been a shortage of whistles; there’s always been a shortage of people willing to blow them. WikiLeaks was a new kind of whistle, but I think looking back the historic figure to emerge from all that will be the guy sitting deep inside a federal prison: Bradley Manning.

Exactly right. All the hyperventilating about Julian Assange ignored one vital detail: that all WikiLeaks’ most explosive material came from one man, Bradley Manning, and their trove of his goodies ran out long ago. Would that a tortured, incarcerated teen was as attractive to journalists as a posturing berk in a suit.

Astonished by this chart, courtesy of CR Kenya. Why does FDI appear to have surged just as the country was mired in political crisis?

TechCrunch’s Matt Burns: Will The Microsoft Surface Tablet Redefine Mobile Computing?

Microsoft hasn’t been hip since Windows XP. Windows 7 barely makes up for Windows Vista. The fate of Windows Mobile rests on a struggling Finnish company. The Zune was never loved. Bing is a clone. No one uses Hotmail. I still don’t exactly know the benefit of Windows Live. The company’s lone shinning star is a 7-year old game system. Microsoft has been just surviving over the last decade.

Harsh, but in line with the common perception in the marketplace. It’s a sign of how far Windows has sunk that Microsoft, always a big manufacturer of PC accessories, has announced it’s making an actual Windows PC for the first time in its history… and people aren’t that excited.

They may be right not to be: Windows 8 and Windows RT have a lot of question marks hanging over them, not least that confusing double structure. But it would be churlish not to give Microsoft some credit. In a swoop they’ve redefined themselves as a maker of thin, attractive, high-powered consumer computing devices. As a decent competitor to Apple, in other words.

The paradox of successful capitalism is that, one way or another, risk has to be socialised. The US uses its defence budget and an active fiscal and monetary policy to do the job; Germany its banking and welfare system.

Britain in 2012 has to find ways of doing the same – but Osborne and the Treasury, supported by the governor of the Bank of England, remain implacably opposed.

Will Hutton’s critiques of the Coalition’s economics are consistently the most trenchant and concise.

Ages ago I argued that the economic effect of the Coalition’s cuts would be so clear and immediate - and negative - that they’d be quickly forced to alter course. Officialy, of course, that hasn’t happened, and the Chancellor’s position is that ‘there is no Plan B’ - but for a few invest-for-growth schemes funded with money found down the back of the No. 11 sofa.

But in a column a couple of months ago, the Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner - hardly a deficit reduction sceptic - argued that in fact, the automatic stabilisers built into the deficit reduction plan have already created a sort of u-turn by default:

The differences between Labour and the Coalition on macro-economic policy are in any case more about rhetoric than substance. Continued economic contraction has caused the automatic stabilisers to kick in, slowing the pace of deficit reduction to one that is actually not so very different to that planned by Labour before it lost power. In a way, the Government is already doing what Labour demands, to the dismay of those who thought a Tory-led administration would match words with actions in pursuit of a smaller state. The automatic stabilisers of welfare spending would in many other countries, including the US, be counted as a discretionary fiscal stimulus.

I suspect this is to overstate the impact of the automatic stabilisers, which by all accounts have so far only delayed the abolition of the deficit by a year or two, while Labour’s plan at the election would have postponed it for several years. But still, it’s important to note that the ‘too far, too fast’ pace which Osborne originally chose has already been modified, albeit pretty much against the Chancellor’s will.

From the Economist’s Free Exchange blog a couple of months back, an obvious-sounding but important clarification:

One puzzling mistake Mr Rachman makes is in implying that the only fiscal alternative to austerity is stimulus; in fact, less austerity is also a decent option. Less austerity would be entirely appropriate in Spain, where gross debt levels remain low by rich world standards. It would be appropriate in Germany. It would be appropriate in lots of places not called Greece or Portugal.

 

Contains vague Mad Men Spoilers for up to last week’s episode.

Discussing when he was told about the recent major plot development for his Mad Men character, Lane Pryce, actor Jared Harris reveals what sounds like a vaguely dysfunctional set in terms of who-knows-what-when.

You’ve got to keep it secret. That was Episode 10, so it was probably a couple of weeks before anyone else would get the scripts. But Jon Hamm knew, because he sits down with Matt before each season and Matt shares his ideas with him. So Jon knew. And you get a feel for when it’s starting to filter through, some strange conversations start to happen. [John] Slattery normally finds out because he knows where the scripts are buried and he goes and reads them before anybody else. Then there’s little conversations you have in the catering line, like, “Hey, I saw the outline for Episode 12.” Uh-huh. “So, that’s a pretty intense episode.” Mm-hmm. And he’s trying to figure out if you know – you go, “Oh is it?” and you’re messing with his head. “Why, what happens?” Eventually someone just puts their arms around your shoulders and goes, “We’re going to really miss you.”

Recommending TED talks can be a bit of a mug’s game, as one man’s inspirational spiel is another’s bland California nonsense. But I urge you to find time for David Keith’s brilliantly persuasive talk, from five years ago, on geoengineering - specifically, the possibility of cooling the planet by inserting sulphates into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight.

The question of geoengineering is vexed and arouses passions on all sides, and I’ve taken thousands of words in the past to essentially say ‘uh, let’s not rule it out.’ What Keith’s talk does brilliantly is make the case for geo-engineering not as an alternative to mitigation, but as a vital tool to get us through the crunch period later this century when emissions have started to come down but CO2 concentrations are still dangerously high:

Along the way he acknowledges many of the common criticisms of the possibility of even considering geo-engineering, and argues convincingly and charmingly that at least researching the idea is essential - if only because, if the US or a multilateral institution doesn’t do it, an emerging power like China might take it on itself to start pumping sulphates into the air all by itself.

Mark Zuckerberg is such a divisive and interesting figure that it’s rare to find a decent profile of him, but this pre-IPO piece from New York Magazine makes a convincing case that he’s become an orthodox and highly effective CEO. And it’s full of little gems of stories that make me think David Kirkpatrick’s company bio The Facebook Effect might be worth a read. Such as:

One of Steve Jobs’s famous recruiting techniques was to take potential hires on long walks around Palo Alto while sharing his vision for Apple. A Zuckerberg confidant says he’s adopted this tactic and done his idol one better. Near Facebook’s old headquarters in Palo Alto is a trail winding up into the mountains. Zuckerberg led recruits up this trail, the source says, and learned to time his pitch so the full “aha” would hit right as the hike culminates in a breathtaking view.

Silicon Valley people are supposed to be so dazzlingly intelligent and slightly Aspergers in their disdain for human sentimentality. Yet they seem highly susceptible to this kind of recruitment-consultant trickery.

Of course, ‘skilled CEO’ primarily means ‘ruthless bastard,’ as evidenced by this lovely story of how Zuck shamelessly took advantage of Google’s hospitality to seduce his now-right-hand-woman, Sheryl Sandberg:

When the tech elite flew to Davos for the World Economic Forum that January, Zuckerberg rode with Sandberg and the gang on Google One—the 767 owned by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The two spent the flight huddled conspiratorially—a fact that did not go unnoticed within Google.

For all his new-found skill at HR jiggery-pokery, though, Zuckerberg’s primary asset seems to be his ruthlessness at getting rid of people - Shawn Parker, Eduardo Saverin, and countless more - who aren’t adding enough value to the company. Or, as the article funly puts it:

“Basically, there are two ways to build an organization,” a former Facebook employee explains. “You can be really, really good at hiring, or you can be really, really good at firing.” Zuckerberg has been really good at firing.

“I never get emotional,” says Nguyen, who hasn’t spoken to his parents in six years. “I can have the biggest argument with someone, and five minutes later, I won’t even remember that it happened.”

Fast Company pretty much lets Silicon Valley crazy-person Bill Nguyen hang himself in this fun profile.

For suburban kids hitting their stride during the Clinton years, there weren’t very many love songs to choose from. There was plenty of raging against the machine and Pavement-style irony to go around, but romance was generally the subject of mockery. In order to break through the era’s postmodern glaze, you either had to be an outcast, or be too comically self-indulgent to notice the world around you. Billy Corgan, at least for a time, was both.

I’m not sure if “Luna” should really be in Nerve.com’s 25 Greatest Love Songs of the 1990s, but it’s hard to disagree with the above.

God she’s fascinating. Under different circumstances I suspect she might have made a formidable politician.

This image of a Montana mountain at Sunrise really is something.

I have to tell you that, over the course of several years, as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

Barack Obama

Well, he got there in the end.

Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopolous risks taking on the prevailing online consensus that piracy is basically victimless, at least for big producers:

I worked at major movie studios for years, and I know exactly the consequences of movie piracy. I was around for several rounds of massive layoffs at studios where thousands of jobs were eliminated. There is a direct and real effect on a large American industry. While Tom Cruise or the president of the studio doesn’t see a dent in his paycheck, you might see the entire accounting department outsourced to trim overhead.

If that sounds too much like a sad Detroit auto industry sob story — the fault of an industry that failed to evolve – here’s the sobering truth that film executives won’t outright say: they ARE adapting. They’re adapting by making terrible movies. And it’s actually a sound business move.

First, several studios shuttered their arthouse imprints like Picturehouse and Warner Independent in the past few years. So no more “good” movies that don’t make huge profits. Then, they cut their slates, meaning that they used to release about 15 movies and year, and cut that to around 11. That’s why sometimes you look at the movie listings and it seems like there’s nothing new and good out that week. It also means each movie has to be more of a sure bet.

That’s why there’s turd torpedos like Battleship based on a toy franchise, and that’s why there will be endlessly unneeded sequels like Hangover Part III. That’s why Katherine Heigl could drive a Lamborghini off a cliff every month for a year if she wanted.

It’s piracy’s fault. Don’t pirate. Don’t give Katherine Heigl a Lamborghini.