WSJ: “Why not abandon elections and replace them with surveys? Surveys turn citizens into “respondents” answering from home by phone or computer. Respondents are scientifically selected to represent a slice of the population. Answering is easy, to please Democrats, and since your qualities and attributes are selected without regard to your name, there’s no risk of fraud, which should please Republicans. Now that we have surveys made reliable by the science of polling, why do we need elections with their hoopla, ceremony, and expense—not to mention their chanciness, rowdiness and unreason?”
Subscribed on how the amazing digital transformation of New York Times: “Seen over the arc of the last decade, it’s clear that The New York Times has been slowly transforming from a newspaper, to an online publication, to a media conglomerate complete with technology-focused employees, apps, and new offerings every few financial quarters. Now The New York Times is effectively a tech company, with data scientists working just as fervently as its journalists. And they’ve done an impeccable job orchestrating several services and offerings into one platform, The Times. So, what can an aspiring subscription business learn from the last 12 years of the New York Times’s amazing transformation? Simply put, if you want to keep up with the times (no pun intended), you need to be flexible and use technology, data, subscriptions, and ultimately, make what the subscribers want your main focus. The New York Times thinks of its customers as subscribers, who have subscriptions, and ultimately, assets to the brand.”
Joel Mokyr reviews “How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth” by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin”: “Where the book truly shines is pointing out why the Great Enrichment was relatively late in coming and why the pre-1750 world — with a few exceptions — remained poor. The authors admirably survey the consensus that has emerged on the subject. Three major factors held the economies back. First, as neo-Malthusians such as Galor and Clark have maintained, before 1750 population growth in many cases wiped out the fruits of productivity growth, such as they were. Second, predators of various kinds and extractive institutions (North-Wallis-Weingast’s “natural state”) not only pillaged and plundered the riches of the few places that had been economically successful, they extinguished incentives to invest and innovate. Finally, until institutions had been established to govern and control the accumulation and dissemination of useful knowledge, the opportunities for sustained technological progress remained too limited. As the authors point out in admirable detail, the Industrial Revolution meant that these three brakes on economic progress slowly dissolved to create the Great Enrichment, first in a few economies in the West, then in more and more places around the world.”
