I recommend this EconTalk podcast between Russ Roberts and John Cochrane very highly:
John Cochrane, of the University of Chicago, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the financial crisis. He talks about the origins of the crisis, why the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was flawed from the beginning, why mark-to-market accounting isn’t the cause of the problem, argues for letting banks fail, and makes the case against the large increases in government spending.
I share the skepticism and caution of both Cochrane and Roberts with respect to the financial bailout and the likely short-term and long-term effects of large amounts of government debt-financed government spending, and this discussion captures those ideas clearly.
1. [this one is obvious] The right team won, YAY Steelers! Although there was more drama in getting to the end than was strictly necessary …
2. The Polamalu update of the old Joe Greene Coca-Cola ad. Warms the cockles of my old-school Pittsburgher heart!
3. GE’s Scarecrow/”If I only had a brain” smart grid ad:
This Wizard of Oz meme has been running around the smart grid community for a while, and I think GE did a nice job of creating an image of the potential value creation from smart grid technology. Of course, it’s only a 30-second spot, so they focused on distribution automation from a utility perspective, and not on the potential for new end-use products and services for retail customers.
The other thing that GE has done well is actually issuing the ad on YouTube themselves. I wish IBM would do the same, because some of their smart grid ads are very clever, and I’d be happy to do some viral marketing here on their behalf, but they don’t seem to really get the social networking thing. I’m surprised and impressed with GE on this count.
This Advertising Age column also compliments the GE smart grid spot and GE’s ecomagination “reality-augmented” web site. Again, the site focuses on specifics slices of the smart grid space, slices in which GE specializes (such as smart meters) even if they don’t tell the whole story of the smart grid value proposition. The GE smart grid web site does a nice job of enabling visualization and, well, imagination about the potential value of smart grid.
Charles Platt, a former senior writer for Wired magazine, is doing a guest blogging stint at Boing Boing right now. Yesterday he wrote an extremely interesting post about his experience as a Wal-Mart employee. His motivation started with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed, and the extent to which it “didn’t ring true” to him. So he applied for a job to check it out.
His whole post is extremely intereresting, but one detail in particular caught my attention:
My standard equipment included a handheld bar-code scanner which revealed the in-store stock and nearest warehouse stock of every item on the shelves, and its profit margin. At the branch where I worked, all the lowest-level employees were allowed this information and were encouraged to make individual decisions about inventory. One of the secrets to Wal-Mart’s success is that it delegates many judgment calls to the sales-floor level, where employees know first-hand what sells, what doesn’t, and (most important) what customers are asking for.
In many ways, Wal-Mart internalizes the value of local, private knowledge directly into its business strategy, and does so better than any other company. They are a wonderful example of the value of using technology to harness “edge intelligence”, which is the trendy phrase for the diffuse private knowledge about which Hayek and others have written so extensively, and that inspires the name of this web site.
