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Progress and Glamour: Does Illusion Drive Economic Development?
Here's a video of a talk I gave at the Kauffman Foundation's annual bloggers conference.
You can see the other videos by scrolling down the page here.
I think the dynamic described in the talk, and in Colin Campbell's book, is a real one. But I don't believe that all consumption is disillusioning. Although any given artifact may, as Henry Petroski's work on innovation suggests, provide ideas for improvements, that doesn't mean we don't enjoy it. And, of course, some products actually provide even more enjoyment than expected, which may be one reason the iPad is selling so well.
Books I mention:
Colin Campbell's The Romantic Ethic And The Spirit Of Modern Consumerism>
Henry Petroski's The Evolution of Useful Things: How Everyday Artifacts-From Forks and Pins to Paper Clips and Zippers-Came to be as They are
The Chart Every Journalist Covering the Fukushima Plant Should Read
For the past week, I've been complaining that journalists covering possible radiation dangers from Fukushima plant have abandoned the old convention of putting radiation exposures in context (usually by comparing them to chest x-rays). The result is that all "radiation" sounds equally dangerous, and people in Plano, Texas, start stocking up on potassium iodine.
Randall Munroe of the priceless xkcd has put together a serious, and seriously useful, graphic that elegantly supplies an abundance of context. It's too big to reproduce here, so go see it here.
On his blog (or "blag") entry about the chart, Munroe makes an important point:
Lastly, remember that while there's a lot of focus on possible worst-case scenarios involving the nuclear plants, the tsunami was an actual disaster that's already killed thousands. Hundreds of thousands more, including my best friend from college, are in shelters with limited access to basic supplies and almost no ability to contact the outside world. If you're not sure how to help, Google's Japan Crisis Resource page is a good place to start.
What Makes the iPad Magical?
When Apple introduced the iPad last year, it added a new buzzword to technology marketing. The device, it declared, was not just "revolutionary," a tech-hype cliché, but "magical." Skeptics rolled their eyes, and one Apple fan even started an online petition against such superstitious language.
But the company stuck with the term. When Steve Jobs appeared on stage last week to unveil the iPad 2, which hit stores Friday, he said, "People laughed at us for using the word 'magical,' but, you know what, it's turned out to be magical."
Apple has long had an aura of trend-setting cool, but magic is a bolder — and more provocative — claim. In a promotional video, Jonathan Ive, the company's design chief, explains it this way: "When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical, and that's exactly what the iPad is." Mr. Ive is paraphrasing the famous pronouncement by Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction author and futurist, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
So in celebrating the iPad as magical, Apple is bragging that its customers haven't the foggiest idea how the machine works. The iPad is completely opaque. It is a sealed box. You can't see the circuitry or read the software code. You can't even change the battery.
Apple has long had an aura of trend-setting cool, but magic is a bolder — and more provocative — claim. In a promotional video, Jonathan Ive, the company's design chief, explains it this way: "When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical, and that's exactly what the iPad is." Mr. Ive is paraphrasing the famous pronouncement by Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction author and futurist, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
So in celebrating the iPad as magical, Apple is bragging that its customers haven't the foggiest idea how the machine works. The iPad is completely opaque. It is a sealed box. You can't see the circuitry or read the software code. You can't even change the battery.
Read the rest here.
To receive copies of my articles (or links to them, depending on the publication) by email, send an email to [email protected].
Why Do People Watch the Oscars?
My latest WSJ column takes up a perennial question. Here's the opening:
The Academy Awards show is ridiculous. Guests arrive in broad daylight wearing the most formal of evening gowns. Presenters, including some of the world's most accomplished performers, read their lines with the studied cadence of high-school commencement speakers.
In contrast to the Super Bowl, a beauty pageant or "American Idol," nothing happens on stage that affects the outcome of the competition. The production numbers are just padding. And, of course, the speeches are boring, the show is too long, and comedies never have a chance.
Yet the Oscar ceremony somehow manages to be compelling. In a good year like 2010, its U.S. audience tops 40 million, according to Nielsen Co. In a bad year like 2008, it tops 30 million. By contrast, the recent Grammy ceremony, which offers far better musical numbers, won its week with only 26.7 million viewers.
The Oscar show's appeal can't just be the fun of water-cooler criticism. You can get all the information you need for that from Twitter or the next day's newspaper. You don't need to sit through the awards ceremony.
In fact, as the marketing efforts of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences suggest, the glamour of the Oscars lies not in the movies the show ostensibly celebrates, but in the "Oscar moment." Watching the Oscars gives viewers the chance to imagine being singled out before the whole world as special, beloved and really good at their jobs.
To promote the show, the Academy is giving fans in New York City two different chances to pose holding Oscars, either virtual statues or, at Grand Central Terminal, real ones. There, "the big payoff is that you get to go on stage and have your Oscar moment," says Janet Weiss, the Academy's director of marketing. Some people, she says, even show up in gowns and tuxes.
Read the rest here. That's my photo to the right, taken on Friday in Grand Central.
[Cate Blanchett photo courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences]
Jonathan Rauch on Academic Freedom
Although a few months old, this speech is so good I thought I should share the video.
Jonathan Rauch - FIRE's CFN 2010 from FIRE on Vimeo.
Buy Jonathan's excellent book, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought here
Where To Find Me
As you've no doubt noticed, I don't post much here any more. I do a lot of quick, bloggy posting on my Facebook page and on Twitter (@vpostrel and @deepglamour, depending on subject matter). And I still edit a group blog at DeepGlamour.net, which usually has two or three new posts a week.
I write every two weeks in the WSJ's Saturday "Review" section. To receive links to my articles via email send an email to [email protected].
Progress at the Frontier: The Next Big Thing Is a Lot of Little Things
The hardest economic question is, What comes next? What, in other words, are the new sources of economic value? How can businesses grow and our standard of living rise?
Sometimes the answer is simply more of the same. Growth comes from rolling out existing goods and services to new markets, until there's a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. This kind of progress may be hard to achieve, but you at least start with a clear notion of what it would look like.
That's why catch-up economies like China today or South Korea in the past can grow so fast. Their businesses don't have to figure out what to make or sell. They know what's possible by looking abroad, and have a reasonable idea of what consumers, local or international, want to buy. Refrigerators and air conditioning are popular; so are shampoo and disposable diapers.
At the economic frontier, the hardest question gets much harder. You no longer have a clear vision of the future. You know neither what's possible nor what people want. You can only guess. Starbucks or FedEx may sound obvious in retrospect, but they were once crazy ideas.
This challenge makes it harder for advanced economies like the U.S. to grow. It also explains a strange cultural phenomenon: our nostalgia for the future.
A half century ago, "the future" seemed specific and tangible. Progress meant either big increases in what we already had—houses, cars and appliances for everybody—or exciting new ways to provide the same broadly defined goods—jet packs, flying cars and superhighways for transportation, nuclear power for electricity, videophones for communication. Either way, progress was something you could easily visualize. Nowadays those mid-century illustrations representing "the future" generate a mixture of amusement and longing, even in people too young to remember the original context.
We still tend to equate progress with engineering projects providing familiar, easily visualized goods. All those new highways, railroads and skyscrapers in China mimic our past, but we see them as the future. Or witness the State of the Union address, in which the president invoked the space race and interstate highway system—the futurism of the mid-20th century—to promote their contemporary equivalents: clean energy, electric cars and high-speed rail. That's progress you can picture.
But at the economic frontier, the big advances rarely look like that. There are occasional headline grabbers, of course, like the Web browser and all the disruptive enterprises that followed from it. Even these are surprises. The president could extol Google and Facebook as examples of American innovation only because they're already everyday experiences. Nobody saw them coming. The same is true of Starbucks and FedEx, hip-hop and Nike, Wal-Mart and Pixar. They aren't the future we imagined.
Read the rest here.
Changing Kidney Donation Norms
People who oppose changing the law to permit financial compensation for kidney donors sometimes argue that introducing money might change the social norms that now encourage donation and actually reduce donations.
On Dec. 23, Ronald Herrick gave a kidney to his twin brother. On Dec. 27, he died — 56 years later.
Mr. Herrick, who was 79 when he died last month of heart ailments, was the world's first kidney donor. Despite the experimental nature of the surgery, he recovered fully. His remaining organ expanded to do the work of two.
Back in 1954, a kidney transplant was only conceivable between identical twins like the Herricks. Today, thanks to immunosuppressant drugs, donors and recipients require little more than compatible blood types. With laparoscopic techniques, the largest incision required is just a couple of inches long, allowing a hospital stay of only two or three days.
But cultural norms haven't kept up with medical advances. "People have called me crazy and looked at me like I have two heads," says Diane Zocchia, who gave her cousin a kidney five years ago and works for the National Kidney Registry, a nonprofit group that facilitates living-kidney donation. "When they find out there is no financial gain," says Ms. Zocchia, "they really think you're nuts."
More than 87,000 people are on the national waiting list for kidneys from deceased donors, a number that is growing steadily. In Los Angeles County, the average wait is now more than 10 years. Only living donors can make up the difference, and that requires changing attitudes.
Read the rest here.