AUGUST 27, 2009

As a voracious consumer of internet media, I’m going to try to post, on a regular basis, the most interesting things I’ve read over the course of the week. Here goes!

• Is anyone surprised that as our lifestyles become more varied, increasingly-weirder insurance products are coming to market? Two from this week: Rapture insurance for the pets of believers, and fantasy football insurance, which covers league fees and other expenses in the event that a highly-rated player goes down to injury. I really could have used this after I drafted Tom Brady last year. (h/t to Tyler Cowen for both links)
• In times where everything looks like it’s going to hell in a handbasket, it’s tough to keep perspective on just how much things have changed in the last 100 years. This chart, from Berkeley professor Brad DeLong, illustrates how radically different our day-to-day lives are from those of our great-great-grandparents. My favorite stat: 25% (!) of households had boarders or lodgers living under the same roof in 1900.
• Pitchfork’s Eric Harvey has a long thought piece on the social history of the MP3 - an investigation into how, exactly, the MP3 has changed the way we interact with music. It’s pretty dense, but worth a read. A lot of Harvey’s piece re-hashes the intellectual property debates that have been raging since the mid-90’s, but one particularly interesting bit is about the social cohesion and shared experience that music once offered. Chances are, if I whistle the chorus of “Can’t Buy Me Love”, someone in the room will be able to sing the words. But what about a song from my current favorite band? Maybe not.
• Time has a piece in this week’s edition entitled “The Real Cost of Cheap Food“. To those familiar with the sustainable food movement, there’s not too much new here, but it’s fascinating to watch new ideas bubble up from a few fringe activists, to academics, to publications geared towards intellectuals like The New York Times magazine, and finally to general-interest, establishment periodicals like Time.

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AUGUST 19, 2009

Earlier this month, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin weighed in on the health reform debate in a Facebook note. Among other things, she said:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

And, a week beforehand, an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily said this:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

The problem is that neither of these accusations is true. Palin’s assertion has been deemed “false” by The New York Times, the Atlantic, CNN and the Associated Press. Politfact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking arm of the St. Petersburg Times, called the claim a “sci-fi scenario not based in reality”. And, of course, anyone who’s read Hawking’s wonderful A Brief History of Time knows that the physicist is, in fact, British, has lived in Britain his whole life, and is an enrollee in Britain’s National Health Service.

What I’m quickly finding, though, is that the truth content of people’s claims in this volatile debate doesn’t matter much. The “death panel” meme has quickly rocketed around the community of activists opposing Democratic health care reforms and has become the rallying cry for that group. I’ve gotten no less than five chain e-mails from relatives making that claim in the last week. If reform were to fail in Congress this fall, “death panels” would be high on my list of reasons why. And more than one person has made the Stephen Hawking claim to me in private conversation - think of it as a high-brow version of the “death panel”.

As someone who has followed the health reform debate very closely, I am completely, utterly baffled by this. There are many good reasons (reasons not based on lies) to oppose the specific plans Democrats have outlined on how to reform the US health care system. I don’t agree with almost any of them, but disagreement is OK. Being ill-informed on basic facts is not.

I always thought that the internet and the availability of a wealth of information at anyone’s fingers would end the kind of mendacious punditry you see on display here. After all, anyone can very quickly determine that there are no “death panels” in any of the reform bills before Congress. But I think there’s a parallel problem - the internet makes it very difficult for news consumers to separate reliable reporting from rumors and hearsay.

As consumers, we sometimes rely on “signals” to tell us when something is of value - which is why, for instance, banks used to be operated in big, majestic, safe-looking buildings. Signals in the TV news business include attractive anchors, fancy graphics, a busy-looking newsroom behind the anchor - all things that assure us that the source we’re watching is reputable and responsible. But on the internet, the signals of quality information are easy to replicate and in some cases are removed entirely by the medium (as in Facebook, which puts all user information, including notes, in the same format).

I truthfully don’t know what can be done about this problem, and I suspect that even the President’s media advisers don’t either. They’ve created a FAQ-style website to fight some of the more outlandish claims, but I’m not sure sites like these can possibly act fast enough to rebut these rumors that travel through e-mail chains and watercooler conversations. And even if it were possible to rebut the rumors, one by one, to each person who heard them, there’s no guarantee they’d end up changing anyone’s minds. One thing’s for sure - it’ll be very disappointing for everyone if we allow falsehoods to determine the shape of public debate.

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JUNE 2, 2009

After my last post went up, I got a few e-mails from friends and family (yeah, I send people my blog posts) wondering how the government could possibly “do something” about the nation’s food problems without raising costs for American families. And, unfortunately, the short answer is that they can’t - any successful government effort to reform America’s diet will mean higher costs for consumers. The reason? Modern management and scientific techniques have made our food industry insanely productive, yet those same techniques have led to the ethical, environmental and health problems I mentioned in my last post. Fixing the problems mean losing some (but not all) of the benefits of a productive food industry, which means higher costs for food. You can see this divide in the higher prices you pay for vegetables at a farmer’s market vs. those at a supermarket.

But, I’d respond with the fact that a reformed food industry ultimately means lower environmental, ethical and health costs. Incidences of diabetes and obesity, for instance, would likely decline if high-fructose corn syrup were not used to the extent it is today. And those two diseases account for a variety of other complications that cause health costs to rise, a serious threat to family budgets as well as the continued solvency of Medicare. It’s the same with the scarcity of fresh foods in poor urban areas. So ultimately, we’re paying for our Pop-Tarts and Coco-Puffs, but in a much less transparent and predictable way.

Economists call this an “externality” - a cost of a product not reflected in its price. Consider, for example, a hypothetical widget plant in Widgetville, VA. The total market value of the widgets produced there is $10,000,000, but, in the manufacturing process, the widget plant causes $1,000,000 worth of damage to Widgetville in the form of pollution. Those costs, under a strictly free market, are borne by the residents of Widgetville; they are not reflected in the price of the widgets everyone else buys. Not fair, right?

There are four ways to fix externalities: 1) make the external cost illegal - in this case, simply outlaw pollution in Widgetville; 2) pass tort legislation to allow lawsuits against the producers of external costs - in other words, allow Widgetvillians to sue the factory; 3) government provision - in other words, having the government take over the widget industry and set prices itself, to compensate for the external cost; and 4) taxes - in this case, creating a widget tax whose proceeds go to compensate for the external cost.

You can probably imagine that there are downsides to all of these. Making widget pollution illegal means no more widget business. Encouraging lawsuits means huge and unpredictable costs on widget producers, which would discourage the production of widgets, not to mention that damages paid would be ex post facto, requiring Widgetvillians to live in a polluted town. Government control of the industry means a lack of competition, which means poorer-quality widgets. Of these, only taxation manages to capture the true cost of widget production while spreading that impact out among the entire widget market. Widget buyers have to cope with a little additional cost, sure - but Widgetvillians are happy and compensated for their loss and the widget producers are still in business and profitable.

To cope with the external costs of the modern food industry, we’ve tried banning pollution and we’ve tried tort law. There are always loopholes in any pollution law, and the tort system would require someone to actually be poisoned by food before external costs can be imposed. Our political culture precludes attempting long-term nationalization of almost all industries, and it’s not a great idea in any case. What we haven’t tried, however, is a small tax that incentivizes local, healthy ingredients over mass-produced “food“. And with modern technology, we can easily create much more precise taxes that get closer to the true cost of a good - for instance, charging a 1-cent tax for every 25 miles an ingredient travels from its source to its retail outlet, which would help account for greenhouse gases released in the transportation process, or a small tax indexed to grams of saturated fat or high-fructose corn syrup - funds that could be diverted to Medicare or tax rebates to save people money on medical care. That way, people still have the choice to eat unhealthy foods, but at least those who do eat healthy wouldn’t have to pay for it down the line.

So, the long answer to the question is that yes, food prices would increase. But there are two important advantages in changing tax law to incentivize healthier foods - first, we’d have a dedicated revenue source to deal with unpredictable external costs, and second, families could opt out of paying those costs by making smarter choices at the supermarket.

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MAY 28, 2009

Like a lot of kids, I grew up in a convenience-oriented culinary environment: Pop-Tarts for breakfast, PB&J for lunch and hot dogs, macaroni and cheese, and a hated, tiny portion of canned vegetables for dinner. My mom’s a good cook, but because my dad usually worked late when I was a kid, she was responsible for most of the after-school hours. Between shuttling me and my sister around to all of our activities, it was a rare night when she was able to invest any serious time in cooking dinner. And since I was a pretty lazy kid, all things considered, it’s not a mystery why, upon high school graduation, I weighed around 250 lbs. Now, I’m a pretty tall guy, so it’s not like that’s morbidly obese or anything, but it’s still significantly overweight.  And so, when I moved out, I started to rethink my relationship with food. I came to the conclusion that it was probably best to avoid foods that couldn’t be replicated in a standard kitchen. So - no more Wendy’s (I don’t have a deep fryer, nor a square mold for hamburgers), no more soda, no more hot dogs and no more Pop-Tarts. It’s not a perfect rule - most kitchens don’t have a pasta maker, for instance, and I do use protein supplements - but as a rule of thumb, it’s not too bad.

My decision came at about the same time writer Michael Pollan wrote this brilliant essay summarizing his dietary advice in seven words: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The first clause, while seemingly the most banal, is actually the most revolutionary. Pollan does not consider many American staples as “food” as such, instead categorizing them as food-like substances, packed with exotic chemicals that do a lot to improve the efficiency of the supply chain but not much to improve our health. Not only that, he believes that many American diets are fraught with ethically-questionable foods, from beef (cows are a non-trivial source of greenhouse gases) to coffee (often grown under exploitative circumstances in developing countries).

There seems to be some evidence that people are agreeing with Pollan.  For example, stores like Whole Foods, which sells predominantly organic ingredients, are outperforming the recession, and Food Network’s viewership is way up, especially among young people. Anecdotally, the number of my friends interested in cooking serious meals at home has skyrocketed.

One wonders, though, when our government will catch up to this groundswell. We have two easily-fixable food problems in the United States: first, our existing food system is heavily biased towards corn, and subsidies provided by the federal government are what make things like high-fructose corn syrup - a calorie-dense sweetener added to thousands of foods - economically viable. And, as recounted in this great piece in The Washington Post, countless urban neighborhoods have no easy access to full-service grocery stores and are forced to eat the kinds of chemically-loaded “foods” Michael Pollan wrote about in his essay. Ultimately, we will pay for what we eat (and do not eat) in the form of increased medical costs and higher taxes to pay for healthcare - it’s time we addressed these kinds of problems head-on.

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MAY 5, 2009

The economics of the shift away from traditional media aren’t too complicated. Column inches in a widely-distributed newspaper (or space on a record store shelf) are a scarce resource, necessitating large organizations to manage that resource (i.e. media companies, and their legions of reporters, editors and publishers). Since the internet has made publishing a nearly-free exercise, media companies have lost their leverage over what was formerly a finite resource.

That leverage includes deciding what, exactly, makes it into published form. The power of media companies to decide which content gets published is declining.  When that power did exist, it was mostly very annoying. If your band couldn’t get a record deal, you had no recourse but to keep playing the dive bars in your town - there was no way to bring your music to a wider audience. If your pet issue wasn’t “important” enough to be covered by the local paper, it would remain in obscurity. All that, of course, is different now.

But there are a few instances where the media’s “gatekeeping” role is, in fact, quite valuable. I don’t need a newspaper to tell me what issues are important, nor do I need a record company to tell me what kind of music I like.  But in emergency situations, especially ones I don’t understand, I need someone to differentiate between the truth and the hype, between expert opinion and BS. Reporters and editors are generally educated enough to do that.

Are Twitter users? Well, uh, no. This piece from Foreign Policy’s Evgeny Morozov makes that clear- in the case of the ongoing influenza emergency, most users of the service are either making wildly unsubstantiated claims or idly chitchatting, all the while using the #swineflu hashtag dedicated to actual news about the emergency. For instance, here were the last five Tweets on the #swineflu tag as of 10:07 pm, April 29th:

For the record, that’s four information-free tweets, with one person actually sharing a piece of valuable knowledge.

A glance at my personal Twitter account confirms this anecdotally - one or two people I follow are sharing links and actual information about the crisis, while others are simply using the hashtag while not contributing anything to an ongoing understanding of the issue. The signal-to-noise ratio is very, very low.  This not only makes Twitter almost useless for following this story, but also an excellent channel for misinformation and a potential source of networked panic. And it’s not the first time this has happened - almost every global crisis since Twitter became popular has suffered from an inordinate amount of chatter on the service. If this is what’s going to replace professional reporting, we’re in trouble.

I’m a forward-thinking guy, and I think that the shift of publishing power to individuals is largely a positive thing. I am, after all, writing all this in a blog post. But in a crisis situation, I need to know that what I’m reading is accurate and reliable, and as of yet, the traditional media’s replacement hasn’t come up with a model to avoid misinformation and networked panic.

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MAY 1, 2009

First it started with the evening news.

Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams and even Katie Couric were all over the story.

I’m not talking about Jacoby Ellsbury stealing home the other day, even though I think that should be news - nobody steals home plate!

I’m talking about Swine Flu, the latest worry that’s sweepingSwiffering the nation.

All around me everybody is buzzing about the growing outbreak in the United States. Dr. Gupta is all over it, next we’ll have Dr. Phil trying to psychoanalyze some hypochondriacs who think they have the disease. I don’t think it’s happened yet but I’m calling it now.

So now that our news media is fully saturated with Pig Influenza stories, it’s spread to everything else I touch, like social media. Everybody on Twitter is tweeting about it(or if you are the CDC Director,”twitting” about it.) Status messages on Facebook range from, “swine flu confirmed in Lowell-eeep!” to, “cough cough .. oink oink .. damn it!”Humorous websites have sprouted up that tests to see if you have Swine Flu. Try this one out for size. After you are done freaking out, get a second opinion.

Most of everybody’s Twitter, Blog, and Facebook has the adorable child kissing a pig, citing it as dangerous activity.

Now I’m not here to play down the seriousness of the issue. The Swine Flu outbreak is a serious issue and should not be taken lightly. However, we shouldn’t be panicking over it. Thought I do confess that it’s really hard not to panic when we are exposed to the 24/7 news cycle of stories that predicts doom for our world. Jon Stewart jokes that the Swine Flu is the last thing that can kill you in Mexico, but in reality he’s probably right.

As of the moment of this writing, there are 100 confirmed cases of Swine Flu. Latest census numbers estimate that the United States’ population is at 304,059,724. I tried to calculate the percentage but my calculator broke. That’s how small of a percent it is. As we like to say around the office, you need to keep your risks in perspective.

Fox News has a photo essay on 10 ways you can prevent Swine Flu. The number one way? Washing your hands. Did you know what the best way to prevent a cold is? Washing your hands. Even the President thinks we should wash our hands.

How worried are you about the Swine Flu outbreak?

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APRIL 9, 2009

I’m a big fan of plastic surgery television shows. If Dr. 90210 is on, you can be sure I’m watching it. I’m fascinated by the “before” and “after” shots; I watch Extreme Makeover just to see the transformations. I guess there’s just something about people opting for unnecessary surgery - willingly going “under the knife” - that interests me more than anything.  Why are so many people willing to take the risk of something going completely wrong?  Is the desire really just driven by mere vanity?  Is it a need to attain the perfect physical traits of  the air-brushed celebrities on the covers of Us Weekly?  Perhaps, but I came across a Reuters article released yesterday that suggested a different reasoning.

I don’t know if ”shocked” is the right word to describe my reaction; ”disturbed” is probably better.  Apparently, the reason why many these days are flocking to the Dr. Rey’s of the plastic surgery industry is to “stand out” in the job-search world.  No, I’m not kidding. According to the article, “surgeons and patients are now citing increased interest in surgery among people wanting to look younger and ‘fresher’ for the ever-competitive job market.” A St. Petersburg Times article covers the same topic and points out that seniors who planned on retiring but face dwindling retirement savings are looking for a way to stay competitive, and they’re turning to plastic surgery for help.

It’s not that think there’s anything wrong with people wanting to look their best - a little makeup, moisturizer, and hair spray never hurt anyone - but it’s unfortunate that there is increasing social pressure to look younger and be “perfect” no matter the cost. There just seems to be more and more emphasis on the outward appearance; our unenhanced selves no longer seem to be good enough.  Once upon a time, a person was revered for his or her age, or at least for the wisdom and confidence that (hopefully) accompanied it.  And it used to be that confidence, determination, and experience were the determining factors for getting ahead in the workplace - a ”fresh” face was not part of the equation.  

At TMG, we spend a lot of time researching how consumers spend their time and money - and on what - because we know that it says a whole lot about what they value.  While cosmetic surgery procedures as a whole decreased 9% to $11.8 billion in 2008,  it’s clear that vanity and superficiality remain at the top of the list of motivating factors  

Some might argue that the risks associated with altering one’s self to gain a competitive advantage in the workplace is just another example of  desperate times calling for desperate measures, but what do you think?  Understandable, or have we taken this plastic surgery thing too far?

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APRIL 1, 2009

The first thing I heard on the radio yesterday morning had a familiar ring to it - my food isn’t safe. Yesterday it was unsafe pistachios, but fill in that blank with tomatoes, jalapenos, or peanuts and it’s the same story we’ve been hearing for the past year.

As Gayle mentioned last week, at TMG we have a particular interest in effective use of social media in times of crisis. And social media is absolutely necessary in this type of situation, where getting current information is critical to save lives. It’s been fascinating to watch the progression of the use of social media in a crisis, particularly because of the broad approach and the scope of tools utilized. Government agencies, surprisingly, have forged new ground in this area, especially around food safety. Take the peanut butter salmonella outbreak. The agencies in charge (primarily the FDA, CDC, and HHS) didn’t dip their toes in the water; they dove right in - using an issue-specific blog, Twitter, widgets, e-cards, badges, virtual worlds, blogger outreach - constantly adding to and adapting tools as the crisis evolved.

These efforts have been discussed a great deal recently. Gloria first mentioned them here on Undercurrents several months ago, and more recently it was the subject of the session at the inaugural Government 2.0 Camp this past weekend. I am particularly encouraged by these thoughts that Andrew Wilson, a Web manager for HHS’s Web Communications and New Media division, offered to Fedline’s Elise Castelli.

While the strategy for the pistachio outbreak is still being developed, the social media outreach done for the peanut crisis is not a one-off event. Rather it is a new approach to keeping the public informed in the spaces citizens typically go for information.

One of my favorite voices on the topic of food safety is Kevin Coupe - his daily rundown on all things retail is one of the first things I read every morning. Without speaking specifically about the government’s social media efforts, Coupe often speaks broadly on the subject and why it’s so important to have a strategy that emphasizes fast, accurate communication and transparency. One of my favorite quotes came from a post at the end of February:

[A] national system of transparency and traceability needs to be created that will allow [food safety] information to be accessible by every business and every consumer. It is simply unacceptable that we have a system that allows such transgressions to take place with increasing frequency.

I think this is a great goal, and the recent social media efforts make me feel like we’re inching toward achieving it. I personally feel safer knowing that the most updated information will be delivered via my chosen social media vehicle - which in this case is my Twitter stream - and that I can quickly distribute this up-to-the-moment information to the people I care about. Yesterday when I heard the news about pistachios, I felt better knowing that I had the whole story, courtesy of @FDArecall, at my fingertips.

The government is leading the way, but now I want companies to also help get information out there - using every resource available. With the exception of a few industry ads, we didn’t see that much communication from companies at all during the peanut crisis. While companies need to protect their reputations, I need to feel that my safety is their highest priority. This means getting out there and having a voice, even if it means admitting there could be problems with a product.

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MARCH 17, 2009

Consumers are supposed to be savvier these days. Sophisticated. More educated than ever before. So why is it that we’re still making such foolish decisions when it comes to our health? Once upon a time, some could blame ignorance for their poor decisions, but certainly not anymore. We have an overabundance of information… and yet we still continue to make unwise choices.

Here are just a few that baffle me:

TANNING BEDS
Recently I came across an article stating that in many cities there are more tanning salons than Starbucks or McDonald’s. That’s shocking for two reasons: 1) there seems to be a Starbucks and/or McDonald’s on every street corner (sometimes even two) where I live, and 2) skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in America. Just ONE exposure to a tanning bed increases the risk of melanoma by 75%!

DIET AND EXERCISE
65% of the American population is overweight, and the number of obese Americans is now greater than the number of those merely overweight, according to government figures released in January. One out of every 5 meals Americans consume is prepared outside of the home, and only 3 in 10 adults get the recommended amount of physical activity.

SMOKING
This is the most puzzling one of them all. Smoking kills 1 in 10 adults (5.4 million) globally per year, and yet more than 1 billion people on the planet still smoke!

So given all this information, why are we still willing to take the risks? Is it pure laziness, or apathy? I don’t think it’s that simple. I wonder if the advancement of technology and medical breakthroughs play a part in our unhealthy decisions. In many ways, I think they’ve led us to become more of a reactive society than a proactive one. Gain weight? Well, there’s always liposuction, stomach stapling, and diet pills. Wrinkles from tanning and over-exposure to the sun? Nothing that a shot of Botox and a chemical peel can’t fix. Cancer from smoking? Radiation and medical advancements in cancer treatments have come a long way. Is it possible that we abuse our bodies partly because we believe that medicine will save us - that innovation can solve any problems that may arise? Possibly.

So does this mean that we should stop innovating? By all means, no! What it does mean is that we need to stop making excuses, stop blaming conflicting health reports and headlines, stop expecting medicine to fix a problem that we’ve caused, and start taking ownership of our decisions. We can blame the companies that market unhealthy products to us all we want, but at the end of the day, we - the consumers - must start taking responsibility for our own decisions. Then, and only then, will companies be forced to make changes. We are the ones with the control; let’s start acting like it.

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MARCH 3, 2009

Stanford University academics Ryan Lampe and Petra Moser have recently been intensely debating the merits of patent pools.  A patent pool is basically a form of intellectual sharing.  It’s the result of two or more companies putting their competitive agendas aside and agreeing instead to cross-license various “patent pieces” that are required to build a single technology.  While the idea makes sense, the jury is still out as to whether patent pools actually encourage or hinder innovation.

As TechDirt’s Mike Masnic explains, “Patent pools tend to come about when you have a lot of patents in and around a particular product, creating ‘patent thickets’ where a bunch of different patent holders all hold onto important pieces of the puzzle.  The worst case scenario, then, is that nothing can get done, as it’s impossible for anyone to innovate without being hit by a ridiculous number of lawsuits.”

Professor Eric Maskin from the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study offers an equally compelling insight on patents and innovation.  Maskin argues that, when discoveries are “sequential,” (each successive invention building essentially on a preceding invention), patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation.  Not only does Maskin believe that society and the inventors themselves could be better off without such patent protection, but he also claims that an inventor’s prospective profit may actually be enhanced by competition and imitation.

Regulators and antitrust authorities in Washington tend to favor patent pools that encourage innovation in industries where overlapping patents and excessive litigation suppress innovation, such as the biotechnology arena.  Lampe and Moser, on the other hand, would argue that patent pools are not always the best solution.  Sometimes, it seems, pool members patent less as soon as the patent pool is established and only resume patenting after the pool dissolves.  Professor Maskin may then insist that it would be better to throw out such patents if they’re clearly hindering, rather than enabling, innovation.

So, when are patent pools a good solution?  Well, last June, six WiMAX firms teamed together to create the Open Patent Alliance, a group whose goal is to jointly license WiMAX patents so they can keep royalty rates in check and make the telecommunications technology more affordable.  The companies involved in the formation of the OPA included Cisco Systems, Intel Corp., Alcatel-Lucent, Clearwire, Sprint and Samsung.

In addition, according to a recent post from PatentHawk, patent pools for the SARS vaccines and HIV/AIDS drugs have risen lately.  That’s a good thing, right?  On February 13, in a speech to Harvard Medical School, GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty announced that his company would contribute its own patents for technologies that might aid research into malaria, cholera and more than a dozen other diseases.

This type of approach is a refreshing mix of social responsibility and good business strategy.  I wonder: how many companies and industries will follow this model?

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