J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 79

Blogging: What to Expect Here...

The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...

"Bring expertise, bring a willingness to learn, bring good humor, bring a desire to improve the world���and also bring a low tolerance for lies and bullshit..." ��� Brad DeLong

"I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me simply by sending me an unsolicited letter���or an email..." ��� Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"I can safely say that I have learned more than I ever would have imagined doing this.... I also have a much better sense of how the public views what we do. Every economist should have to sell ideas to the public once in awhile and listen to what they say. There's a lot to learn..." ��� Mark Thoma

"Tone, engagement, cooperation, taking an interest in what others are saying, how the other commenters are reacting, the overall health of the conversation, and whether you're being a bore..." ��� Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"With the arrival of Web logging... my invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least. Plus, web logging is an excellent procrastination tool.... Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience.... Web logging is a promising way to do that..." ��� Brad DeLong

"Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings.... At Chicago, I found that some of my colleagues overestimated the time and effort I put into my blog���which led them to overestimate lost opportunities for scholarship. Other colleagues maintained that they never read blogs���and yet, without fail, they come into my office once every two weeks to talk about a post of mine..." ��� Daniel Drezner

#workingmemory #publicsphere #internet #weblogging #highlighted

WTF, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, Ja...

WTF, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon S. Wood?!?!?!: Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, and Gordon S. Wood: Letter to the Editor: Historians Critique The 1619 Project https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/letter-to-the-editor-historians-critique-the-1619-project-and-we-respond.html: 'On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies��� independence of Britain ���in order to ensure slavery would continue.��� This is not true. If supportable, the allegation would be astounding���yet every statement offered by the project to validate it is false...

But... but... but... but:

Jill Lepore: These Truths: A History of the United States https://books.google.com/books?id=v2ZSDwAAQBAJ: '���It is imagined our Governor has been tampering with the Slaves & that he has it in contemplation to make great Use of them in case of a civil war,��� young James Madison reported from Virginia to his friend William Bradford in Philadelphia. Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, intended to offer freedom to slaves who would join the British army. ���To say the truth, that is the only part in which this colony is vulnerable,��� Madison admitted, ���and if we should be subdued, we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret.���64 But the colonists��� vulnerability to slave rebellion, that Achilles��� heel, was hardly a secret: it defined them. Madison���s own grandfather, Ambrose Madison, who���d first settled Montpelier, had been murdered by slaves in 1732, apparently poisoned to death, when he was thirty-six...

...In Madison���s county, slaves had been convicted of poisoning their masters again in 1737 and 1746: in the first case, the convicted man was decapitated, his head placed atop a pole outside the courthouse ���to deter others from doing the Like���; in the second, a woman named Eve was burned alive.65 Their bodies were made into monuments. No estate was without this Achilles��� heel.

George Washington���s slaves had been running away at least since 1760. At least forty-seven of them fled at one time or another. In 1763, a twenty-three-year-old man born in Gambia became Washington���s property; Washington named him Harry and sent him to work draining a marsh known as the Great Dismal Swamp. In 1771, Harry Washington managed to escape, only to be recaptured. In November 1775, he was grooming his master���s horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when Lord Dunmore made the announcement that Madison had feared: he offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty���s troops in suppressing the American rebellion.

In Cambridge, where George Washington was assembling the Continental army, he received a report about the slaves at Mount Vernon. ���There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape,��� Washington���s cousin reported that winter, adding, ���Liberty is sweet.���68 Harry Washington bided his time, but he would soon join the five hundred men who ran from their owners and joined Dunmore���s forces, a number that included a man named Ralph, who ran away from Patrick Henry, and eight of the twenty-seven people owned by Peyton Randolph, who had served as president of the First Continental Congress. Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina���s delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dunmore���s declaration did ���more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies���than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.���70 Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmore���s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence....

���All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity,��� read the Virginia Declaration of Rights and Form of Government, drafted in May 1776 by brazen George Mason.... Mason���s original draft hadn���t included the clause about rights being acquired by men ���when they enter into a state of society���; these words were added after members of the convention worried that the original would ���have the effect of abolishing��� slavery.76 If all men belonging to civil society are free and equal, how can slavery be possible? It must be, Virginia���s convention answered, that Africans do not belong to civil society, having never left a state of nature....

In August 1776, one month after delegates to the Continental Congress determined that in the course of human events it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another, Harry Washington declared his own independence by running away from Mount Vernon to fight with Dunmore���s regiment, wearing a white sash stitched with the motto ���Liberty to Slaves.��� During the war, nearly one in five slaves in the United States left their homes, fleeing American slavery in search of British liberty.... Not many succeeded in reaching the land where liberty reigned, or even in getting behind British battle lines. Instead, they were caught and punished. One slave owner who captured a fifteen-year-old girl who was heading for Dunmore���s regiment punished her with eighty lashes and then poured hot embers into the gashes...

#history #moralresponsibility #noted #2019-12-27

Note to Self: Angelo Houston: "Auten-Splinter has been ou...

Note to Self: Angelo Houston: "Auten-Splinter has been out for over 2 years but I���m just now seeing economists much less journalists even acknowledge it. I find it baffling." Well, in 1982 the top 5 individuals' wealth was 0.3% of America's GDP; today the top 5 individuals' wealth is 2.1% of America's annual GDP. With little movement in the rate of profit, it's hard to reconcile that with AS's belief that top 10% CMA has only risen from 28% to 33%. The sharp disagreement between AS 10%ile & top order statistics of income & wealth distribution creates, in the absence of any successful reconciliation, a very strong presumption that there is something wrong with their procedures. I think that has caused lots of pause...

#notetoself #2019-12-27

Fergus Millar (1982): Rich and Poor in the Ancient World ...

Fergus Millar (1982): Rich and Poor in the Ancient World https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n11/fergus-millar/rich-and-poor-in-the-ancient-world: 'By comparison with other societies of the same period, the production of an immense volume of refined consumer goods, sophisticated building techniques, a conscious application of agricultural skills, both local and long-distance trade, the circulation of coins���in short, a market economy���are among the primary characteristics of Graeco-Roman society. It is, moreover, precisely the physical reflections of such an economy which the archaeologist will take as indicating the advance of ���Hellenisation��� into the Near East, or of ���Romanisation��� into Western and Central Europe and North Africa. Some understanding of the technology of production, including that of agriculture (the economic predominance of which, obvious and banal as it is, provides another of the parrot-cries of contemporary thought on ancient society), is essential if one is to grasp how there was a surplus at all. If the actual processes in which millions of primary producers engaged (not to speak of shopkeeping, shipping and so forth) are all just taken for granted, as they are in this book, the notion of the crucial importance of the relations of production seems empty. What is said here about the social relations of production, or rather of the extraction of a surplus by the propertied classes, is in any case confined to a number of broad propositions, even if (as we shall see) these are of exceptional interest and importance. But the propositions are essentially confined to the producers (slaves, serfs, debt bondsmen, free labourers). One of his central arguments, or rather assertions, is that wage labour was economically unimportant, and that it must���for lack of any clear alternative���have been specifically the exploitation of slaves which provided the Greek upper classes with their surplus. The ���possessing classes��� themselves are by and large taken for granted, whether in Classical Greece, the Hellenistic world or the Roman Empire. But it makes a crucial difference whether we are talking of descent-groups which enjoyed a stable possession of wealth inherited over generations (and how stable that possession will itself have been in individual cases will have depended in part on how restrictive the laws of inheritance, gift and dowry were), or whether people could easily rise or fall in the scale of wealth.... The main proposition at which the whole book aims concerns the relevance of class relations and exploitation to the fall of the Roman Empire.... De Ste Croix comes finally to the proposition that the late Roman state, with its vastly increased army (a point which is not now as certain as it used to seem), and its much more elaborate bureaucracy, served to intensify the total burden of exploitation suffered by its economic base���the impoverished peasants on the land.... Whether this was the ���cause��� of the fall of the Empire is (obviously) not a question which allows a simple answer���and especially not in the context of this book, since most of the Greek-speaking part of the Empire took a very long time to fall, or be pushed.... What he has done is to present a consistent and vigorously argued case for seeing not just the Greek world but the whole of Antiquity in a different way. The argument is often unconvincing or partial, and the structure sometimes loose and self-indulgent; in his incapacity to resist an interesting byway he more resembles Herodotus than Thucydides, whom (along with Aristotle) he so much reveres. On the other hand, it is precisely this width of reference, both ancient and modern, which contributes most to the book���s uniquely personal tone.... It does... leave me wishing even more strongly than before that someone would now write a serious book on the overall pattern of economic relations and social structure in one ancient society, for which Classical Athens is the obvious candidate; and that somebody would now produce a detailed study of property, class, the mechanism of economic exploitation, and the struggle between rich and poor citizens, in the ancient Greek world...

#noted #2019-12-27

It seems clear that Gordon Wood has read neither Jill Lep...

It seems clear that Gordon Wood has read neither Jill Lepore nor the papers of Edward Rutledge. Perhaps he should?: Gordon Wood: Response to the New York Times��� Defense of the 1619 Project https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/24/nytr-d24.html: 'Dear Mr. Silverstein: I have read your response to our letter concerning the 1619 Project.... I have spent my career studying the American Revolution and cannot accept the view that ���one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.��� I don���t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776...

Jill Lepore: These Truths: A History of the United States https://books.google.com/books?id=v2ZSDwAAQBAJ: 'In November 1775... Lord Dunmore... offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty���s troops in suppressing the American rebellion.... Five hundred men... ran from their owners and joined Dunmore���s forces, a number that included a man named Ralph, who ran away from Patrick Henry, and eight of the twenty-seven people owned by Peyton Randolph, who had served as president of the First Continental Congress. Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina���s delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dunmore���s declaration did ���more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies���than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.��� Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmore���s offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence...

#noted #2019-12-27

Weekend Reading: Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus (155); The Roman Oration

Weekend Reading: Publius Aelius Aristides Theodorus (155): The Roman Oration https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/11/aelius-aristides-the-roman-oration-it-is-a-time-honored-custom-of-travelers-setting-forth-by-land-or-sea-to-m.html: 'Praise of Rome the City: Praise of your city all men sing and will continue to sing. Yet their words accomplish less than if they had never been spoken. Their silence would not have magnified or diminished her in the least, nor changed your knowledge of her. But their encomiums accomplish quite the opposite of what they intend, for their words do not show precisely what is truly admirable. If an artist should make a botch of it after undertaking to portray in a painting a body of famous beauty, probably everyone would say it would have been better not to paint it at all; to have let them see the body itself, or at least not to show them a caricature. And so I think it is with your city. Their speeches take away from her root of her wonders. It is like some effort to describe the marvelous size of an army such as Xerxes'. The man tells of seeing 10,000 infantry here, and 20,000 there, and so and so many cavalry, without reporting in what excites his wonder even a mere fraction of the whole. For it is she who first proved that oratory cannot reach every goal. About her not only is it impossible to speak properly, but it is impossible even to see her properly. In truth it requires some all-seeing Argos���rather, the all-seeing god who dwells in the city. For beholding so many hills occupied by buildings, or on plains so many meadows completely urbanized, or so much land brought under the name of one city, who could survey her accurately? And from what point of observation?...

...Homer says of snow that as it falls, it covers "the crest of the range and the mountain peaks and the flowering fields and the rich acres of men, and," he says, "it is poured out over the white sea, the harbors and the shores." So also of this city. Like the snow, she covers mountain peaks, she covers the land intervening, and she goes down to the sea, where the commerce of all mankind has its common exchange and all the produce of the earth has its common market. Wherever one may go in Rome, there is no vacancy to keep one from being, there also, in mid-city. And indeed she is poured out, not just over the level ground, but in a manner with which the simile cannot begin to keep pace, she rises great distances into the air, so that her height is not to be compared to a covering of snow but rather to the peaks themselves. And as a man who far surpasses others in size and strength likes to show his strength by carrying others on his back, so this city, which is built over so much land, is not satisfied with her extent. but raising upon her shoulders others of equal size, one over the other, she carries them. It is from this that she gets her name, and strength (rome) is the mark of all that is hers. Therefore, if one chose to unfold, as it were, and lay flat on the ground the cities which now she carries high in air, and place them side by side, all that part of Italy which intervenes would, I think, be filled and become one continuous city stretching to the Strait of Otranto.

Though she is so vast as perhaps even now I have not sufficiently shown, but as the eye test more clearly, it is not possible to say of her as of other cities "There she stands". Again, it has been said of the capital cities of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians���and may no ill omen attend the comparison���that the first would in size appear twice as great as in its intrinsic power, the second far inferior in size to its intrinsic power. But of this city, great in every respect, no one could say that she has not created power in keeping with her magnitude. No, if one looks at the whole empire and reflects how small a fraction rules the whole world, he may be amazed at the city, but when he has beheld the city herself and the boundaries of the city, he can no longer be amazed that the entire civilized world is ruled by one so great.

The Scope of Rome the Empire: Some chronicler, speaking of Asia, asserted that one man ruled as much land as the sun passed, and this statement was not true because he placed all Africa and Europe outside the limits where the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. It has now however turned to be true. Your possession is equal to what the can pass, and the sun passes over your land. Neither the Chelidonean nor the Cyanean promontories limit your empire, nor does the distance from which a horseman can reach the sea in one day, nor do you reign within fixed boundaries, nor does another dictate to what point your control reaches; but the sea like a girdle lies extended, at once in the middle of the civilized of the civilized world and of your hegemony.

Around it lie the great continents greatly sleeping, ever offering to you in full measure something of their own. Whatever the seasons make grow and whatever countries and rivers and lakes and arts of Hellenes and non-Hellenes produce are brought from every land and sea, so that if one would look at all these things, he must needs behold them either by visiting the entire civilized world or by coming to this city. For whatever is grown and made among each people cannot fail to be here at all times and in abundance. And here the the merchant vessels come carrying these many products from all region in every season and even at every equinox, so that the city appears a kind of common emporium of the world. Cargoes from India and, if you will, even from Arabia the Blest one can see in such numbers as to surmise that in those lands the trees will have been stripped bare and that the inhabitants of these lands, if they need anything, must come here and beg for a share of their own. Again one can see Babylonian garments and ornaments from the barbarian country beyond arriving in greater quantity and with more ease than if shippers from Naxos or from Cythnos, bearing something from those islands, had but to enter the port of Athens. Your farms are Egypt, Sicily and the civilized part of Africa. Arrivals and departures by sea never cease, so that the wonder is not that the harbor has insufficient space for merchant vessels, but that even the see has enough, if it really does.

And just as Hesiod said about the ends of the Ocean, that there is a common channel where all waters have one source and destination, so there is a common channel to Rome and all meet here, trade, shipping, agriculture, metallurgy, all the arts and crafts that are or ever have been, all the things that are engendered or or grow from the earth. And whatever one does not see here neither did nor does exist. And so it is not easy to which is greater, the superiority of this city in respect to the cities that now are or the superiority of this city respect to the empires that ever were....

Praise of Rome the Empire: Now, however, the present empire has been extended to boundaries of no mean distance, to such, in fact, that one cannot even measure the area within them. On the contrary, for one who begins a journey westward from the point where at that period the empire of the Persians found its limit, the rest is far more than the entirety of his domain, and there are no sections which you have omitted, neither city nor tribe nor harbor nor district, except possibly some that you condemned as worthless. The Red Sea and the Cataracts of the Nile and Lake Maeotis, which formerly were said to lie on the boundaries of the earth, are like the the courtyard to the house which is this city of yours. On the other hand, you have explored Ocean. Some writers did not believe that Ocean existed at all, or did not believe that it flowed around the earth; they thought that the poets had invented the name and had introduced it into literature for the sake of entertainment. But you have explored it so thoroughly that not even the island therein has escaped

Vast and comprehensive as is the size of it, your empire is much greater for its perfection than for the area which its boundaries encircle. There are no pockets of the empire held by Mysians, Sacae, Pisidians, or others, land which some have occupied by force, others have detached by revolt, who cannot be captured. Nor is it merely called the land of the King, while really the land of all who are able to hold it. Nor do satraps fight one another as if they had no king: nor are cities at variance, some fighting against these and some against those, with garrisons being dispatched to some cities and being expelled from others. But for the eternal duration of this empire the whole civilized world prays all together, emitting, like an aulos after a thorough cleaning, one note with more perfect precision than a chorus; so beautifully is it harmonized by the leader in command.

The keynote is taken by all, everywhere, in the same way. And those who have settled in the mountains are, in their avoidance of discord, lower in pride than those who dwell in the least elevated plains. while those in the rich plains, both men who have cleruchic holdings and men who have your colonial land, are engaged in agriculture. Conditions no longer differ from island to mainland, but all, as one continuous country and one people, heed quietly. All directions are carried out by the chorus of the civilized world at a word or gesture of guidance more easily than at some plucking of a chord; and if anything need be done, it suffices to decide and it is already done. The governors sent out to the city-states and ethnic groups are each of them rulers of those under them, but in what concerns themselves and their relations to each other they are all equally among the ruled, and in particular they differ from those under their rule in in that it is they���one might assert-who first show how to be the right kind of subject. So much respect ha been instilled in all men for him who is the great governor, who obtains for them their all.

They think that he knows what they are doing better than they do themselves. Accordingly they fear his displeasure and stand in greater awe of him than one would of a despot, a master who was present and watching and uttering commands. No one is so proud that he can fail to be moved upon hearing even the mere mention of the Ruler's name, but, rising, he praises and worships him and breathes two prayers in a single breath, one to the gods on the Ruler's behalf, one for his own affairs to the Ruler himself. And if the governors should have even some slight doubt whether certain claims are valid in connection with either public or private lawsuits and petitions from the governed, they straightway send to him with a request for instructions what to do, and they wait until he renders a a reply, like a chorus waiting for its trainer. Therefore, he has no need to wear himself out traveling around the whole empire nor, by appearing personally, now among some, then among others, to make sure of each point when he has the time to tread their soil. It is very easy for him to stay where he is, and manage the entire civilized world by letters, which arrive almost as soon as they are written, as if they were carried by winged messengers.

But that which deserves as much wonder and admiration as all the rest together, and constant expression of gratitude both in word and action, shall now be mentioned. You who hold so vast an empire and rule it with such a firm hand and with so much unlimited power have very decidedly won a great success, which is completely your own. For of all who have ever gained empire you alone rule over men who are free. Caria has not to Tissaphernes. nor Phrygia to Pharnabazus, nor Egypt to someone else; nor is the country said to enslaved, as household of so-and-so, to whomsoever it has been turned over, a man himself not free. But just as those in states of one city appoint the magistrates to protect and care for the governed, so you, who conduct public business in the whole civilized world exactly as if it were one city state. appoint the governors, as is natural after elections, to protect and care for the governed, not to he slave masters over them. Therefore governor makes way for governor unobtrusively, when his time is up, and far from staying too long and disputing the land with his successor. he might easily not enough even to meet him.

Appeals to a higher court are made with the ease of an appeal from deme to dicastery, with no greater menace for those who make them than for those who have accepted the local verdict. Therefore one might say that the men of today are ruled by the governors who are sent out, only in so far as they are content to be ruled. Are not these advantages beyond the old "Free Republic" of every people? For under Government by the People it is not possible to go outside after the verdict has been given in the city's court nor even to other jurors, but, except in a city so small that it has to have jurors from out of town, one must ever be content with the local verdict, deprived undeservedly as plaintiff, not getting possession even after a favorable verdict. But now in the last instance there is another judge, a mighty one, whose comprehension no just claim ever escapes.

There is an abundant and beautiful equality of the humble with the great and of the obscure with the illustrious, and, above all, of the poor man with the rich and of the commoner with the noble, and the word of Hesiod comes to pass, "For he easily exalts, and the exalted he easily checks," namely this judge and princeps as the justice of the claim may lead, like a breeze in the sails of a ship, favoring an accompanying, not the rich man more, the poor man less, but benefiting equally whomsoever it meets...

#weekendreading #2019-12-27

Hyman Minsky (1988): Review of "Secrets of the Temple: Ho...

Hyman Minsky (1988): Review of "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country" by William Greider. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, 799 pp. , $24.95 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40720477.pdf: 'Secrets of the Temple is a long and tedious book with a core that could have been interesting and important. The subtitle of William Greider's book... announces... its chief conceit: the Federal Reserve runs the country. As the only unqualified true proposition in economics is that there are no unqualified true assertions, the conceit is false.... Embellished with sleep-inducing asides on psychology, history, anthropology, and politics. The tone is iconoclastic; implicit conspiracies are suggested, but the evidence is anecdotal. The aim might be to demythicize money and the Federal Reserve, but ultimately Greider' s weak command over the relevant economic theory blunts his message. This reader feels that Greider set out to prove a conspiracy but he couldn't marshall the evidence. The main policy recommendation-to bring the Federal Reserve under the control of the administration-is weak, especially in light of Greider' s strong views. Given the economic weirdos that recent administrations have favored, I am reluctant to endorse such a concentration of power.... During the 12 years of Nixon, Ford, and Carter, the Federal Reserve and the central banks of the advanced capitalist countries seemed impotent validators of price levels resulting from the exercise of market power by unions, firms, and cartels of raw material suppliers. No strong claims that the Federal Reserve runs the country were put forth. Proposals for incomes policies were rife.... The Reagan Administration had an incomes policy... high unemployment... welcom[ing] imports, it kept the minimum wage constant, and it bashed unions. Breaking the air controllers strike was the key anti-inflationary act of the Reagan Administration. The second most important such act may have been the acceptance of the flood of imports.... Ultimately, Greider cannot sustain his conceit because his command of economics is incomplete.... Especially when the financial structure is fragile, the Federal Reserve is mainly a crisis-containing mechanism, rather than the agency of a conspiracy to bias income distribution.... In spite of the evident shortcomings in his understanding of economics, Greider had the makings of a good, forceful, 200-page book that could have... opened a public discussion of the proper use of the Federal Reserve. His text runs to 717 pages. In this case, more is clearly less...

#books #noted #2019-12-27

Ben Thompson: The Value Chain Constraint https://stratech...

Ben Thompson: The Value Chain Constraint https://stratechery.com/2019/the-value-chain-constraint/: 'What matters is not ���technological innovation���; what matters is value chains and the point of integration on which a company���s sustainable differentiation is built; stray too far and even the most fearsome companies become also-rans.... Google... has been predicated on ���technological innovation���. This was possible because the company���s core product���Internet search���entered a value chain with no integrations whatsoever. On the supply side there were countless websites and even more individual web pages, increasing exponentially, and on the demand side were a similarly increasing number of Internet users looking for specific content. Crucially, all of the supply was easily accessible... and all of the demand was capturable.... This meant that the best search engine... could win, and so it did. Google was leaps and bounds better than the competition, thanks to its focus on understanding links���the fabric of the web���instead of simply pages, and consumers flocked to it. This set off the positive cycle I have described in Aggregation Theory: owning demand gave Google increasing power over supply, which came onto Google���s platform on the search engine���s terms, first by optimizing their web pages and later by delivery content directly to Google���s answer boxes, AMP program, etc., all of which increased demand, resulting in a virtuous cycle.... Things have not gone so well for Google Cloud.... The problem... is that the company���s value chain is completely wrong. The world of enterprise software is not a self-serve world (and to the extent it is, AWS dominates the space); what is necessary is an intermediary layer to interact with relatively centralized buyers with completely different expectations from consumers when it comes to product roadmap visibility, customer support, and pricing. It has taken Google many years to learn this lesson: Google Cloud remains a distant third to AWS and Microsoft with a strategy that simply wasn���t working.... The technical attributes of a product are only one piece of what matters to success in the enterprise. Just as important are customization, support, and the ability to sell. Google is widely regarded as being the worst in all three areas. In short, what Google Cloud needs is not a CEO that fits the culture, because the culture of Google is about making the best product technologically and waiting for customers to line-up. That may have worked for Search and for VMWare, but it���s not going to work for Google Cloud. Instead the company needs to actually get out there and actually sell, develop the capability and willingness to tailor their offering to customers��� needs, be willing to build features simply because they move the needle with CIOs, and actually offer real support.... Google Cloud is competing in a different value chain than is Google search, and it needs to build new integrations accordingly...

#noted #2019-12-27

For the Weekend: Patti Smith Group (1979)

Patti Smith Group: Gloria https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLmJT0jxHqM:

#fortheweekend #music #2019-12-26

I object to Doug Jones's characterization of the past 1...

I object to Doug Jones's characterization of the past 100,000 years. It is true that wild mammal biomass is only 1/6 of what it was before the Anthropocene. But total mammal biomass is four times what it was. As far as TEAM MAMMAL biomass is concerned, we have been excellent player-coaches. Doug Jones: 7 Billion | Logarithmic History https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2019/12/26/7-billion-2/: 'The biomass of wild mammals (terrestrial and marine) is only about 1/6 of what it was before humans came on the scene, and total plant biomass is about �� of what it was before humans, largely as a result of deforestation...

#noted #2019-12-26