Go Martha
In the precincts of Rightward opinion, they dismiss concerns about the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else as the effluvium of envy and other base motives. But the problems are real, as...
View ArticleThe Missing Tail
Oh dear. Another red hot business notion that is going to level the old paradigm, change the world as we know it, and create piles of dough for those with the capacity to think outside the box and the...
View ArticleThe Long Tail and the Market Me
This question of the “long tail” gets under the skin in a way unusual for a business idea. See, for example, the forth-and-back here over the last week or so, which is just a tiny corner of the larger...
View ArticleClosed Code in the White House
Business Week ran an article last month (July 10, 2006) on corporations that make a point of learning from their mistakes, and the list is shorter than one might expect. The profit motive apparently is...
View ArticleLabor Day
Yesterday we drove out to Drake’s Beach, on the Point Reyes Peninsula, and the sand sculpture contest that is an annual event there on Labor Day week-end. It was overcast and a little dreary, as...
View ArticleThe Right’s Own Welfare State
Why are right wing writers so dismissive of social security and other means of social support? Could more than ideology be involved – in particular, that many of them have their own private welfare...
View ArticleCommercial Television Tries Community
Is there anything commercial television has touched that is the better for it? Sports? Politics? Drama? Anything? The practice of community has been blessedly exempt, except to the extent television...
View ArticleSweat Voltage: How to Turn Consumption into Production
It is the perverse genius of the corporate economy to constantly find ways to sell us what we used to have for free. In nothing is this more evident than in the realm of bodily exertion. For decades...
View ArticleThe Market’s Casting Call
It is a conceit of the Left that the corporate system keeps us underfoot through the sheer weight of economic power. Power it has, but there is more to it than that. The system couldn’t work unless...
View ArticleThe Untapped Power of Social Sanction
Social sanction is a force that our policy makers, in the thrall of economic thinking, have neglected for too long. It really is effective. I once visited Calgary, in Canada, and on my first day...
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