Marty Manley on economics, politics, technology, and culture

Books

Is Amazon Inside Apple’s OODA Loop?

John Boyd was a legendary US fighter pilot during the Korean War who later became a fighter pilot instructor. He had a standing bet with his students: he would meet you in the air at 30,000 feet and you would get on his tail. He would reverse the positions and get you in his guns in [...]

Will Technology Burst Higher Education’s Bubble?

Imagine a market with incumbents whose core processes are unchanged since medieval times that is held together by huge federal subsidies and protected by a system of self-accreditation designed to exclude rivals. Imagine that the resulting enterprises exploited their monopoly power by overcharging customers and wasting the revenue that resulted on guaranteeing senior employees lifetime [...]

Whatever Happened to the United Farmworkers?

On New Year’s Day, a friend mentioned that Frank Bardacke had published his long-anticipated history of the rise and fall of Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers. It was worth the wait, he assured me and “completely stunning. Just get it and read it. You won’t put it down.” He was right. Bardacke, a respected [...]

Seven Forces that Doom Bookstores and Publishers

During the past few years, the music industry has been hammered. As music went digital, it was pirated, deconstructed, and mashed. As music stores and labels disappeared, their lobby, the RIAA, screamed bloody murder. But amidst the carnage, a funny thing happened: the music industry grew larger even though it had fewer labels and far fewer retailers. Revenue [...]

The Long Slide: Amazon Sells More Digital than Printed Books.

I have always loved printed books. I like discovering them and reading them. I like how they look, feel, and smell. I like rooms filled with books like the reading room of the British Museum or the New York Public Library or the rare book room at Shakespeare’s. I like the cluttered shelves of professor’s [...]

Chance Favors the Connected Mind

This weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a very insightful article by Steve Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You, which argues that video games and TV shows are actually making us smarter and The Ghost Map, which chronicles the heroic efforts of John Snow to prove that London’s terrifying 19th century cholera epidemics were [...]

The Man Who Loves Scholars

I am a huge fan of Simon Winchester — a peripatetic Brit who writes brilliantly about geology, lexicography, and sinology. At his best, Winchester turns science into biography by demonstrating how an obscure scholar shaped our view of the world. Winchester majored in geology at Oxford and worked in the field for many years before [...]

Economics and Politics as Choice Architecture

Some years back, I passed through Schiphol in Amsterdam and realized why some designers consider it the world’s finest airport. Its layout is logical and efficient, public internet terminals are numerous and free, and the stores, including a full 24/7 supermarket, are so attractive that locals come to the airport to shop. But it was [...]

Media Wants to Be Digital, Downloadable, and Free

Moore’s Law famously describes an important trend in computer processing power: the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit increases exponentially. Specifically, Intel founder Gordon Moore observed that chip density doubles about every two years. Thanks to Moore’s Law, computer processing is now free for most intents and purposes. Metcalfe’s [...]

Outside of the Box

Nobel Prize winning physicist and genius quantum mechanic Niels Bohr once pointed out that "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" — a fact that he demonstrated empirically with respect to subatomic particles. Former Economist writer and business historian Marc Levinson has demonstrated that the maxim applies to technology businesses as well in a business [...]

Hitchens vs. God and Islamic Jihad

Our crack shot, karate-chopping, head-bashing action-hero Christopher Hitchens calls a spade a damned shovel in today’s Slate. His piece, entitled "Don’t Mince Words: The London car-bomb plot was designed to kill women" begins Why on earth do people keep saying, "There but for the grace of God …"? If matters had been very slightly different [...]

Mother's Day

Mother’s Day began in Greece — and it may end there, too. To the ancient Greeks, fertility was life. They worshiped mothers with a festival to Cybele, the mother of all gods. Modern Greeks worship motherhood, but they also avoid it. The average woman in Greece gives birth to 1.3 children. Over a generation or [...]

Gravity Lessons

Leaders of businesses assaulted by technology can sympathize with Wile E. Coyote. We know how he feels when he discovers that the road beneath his feet has turned to air. We laugh in sympathy as his expression turns sheepish and he pedals frantically. We know that fall is gonna hurt. These days you can find [...]

Are You Ansgarr?

When you spend just a bit too much time around books, book customers, and technology, this starts to look pretty funny… [Update: they removed the embedding. Click here instead.] And when you spend just a bit too much time around librarians, this is pretty funny too. 

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Cities concentrate people, wealth, culture — and memories. In New York this week, I walked by an Indian restaurant and recalled a lunch almost twenty years ago with friends who tried to persuade me to come work on Wall Street. Across from the restaurant stood a former men’s club where I pitched an IPO fifteen [...]

A Freak of Nurture

Michael Lewis on Race, Class, and Football Michael Lewis (author of the must-read Liar’s Poker and Moneyball as well as the somewhat less terrific New New Thing) recently published The Blind-Side: Evolution of a Game. Despite the title, this book is only partly about football. Lewis likes to describe an industry undergoing a fundamental transformation [...]

The Immortal Game

During the summer of 1972, I worked as a cook in a small resort in New York’s Hudson Valley. It was a small, family-run place patronized entirely by elderly Jews from New York city that hired me, a goyem from southern California, sight unseen. I passed as Jewish well enough — my hair was curly, [...]

Triumph of the Philoperisterons

Every now and again someone comes along and makes me change my mind. They assault my prejudices with facts, challenge my beliefs with evidence, and even cause me to reinterpret certain life experiences. I could defend the old ways of course, but why bother? The other guy is right and I have been wrong. Time [...]

Echo Echo

Recent coast-to-coast flights gave me time to enjoy two cop novels that reveal a lot about the genre and maybe about ourselves. Echo Burning is the 2001 Lee Child potboiler featuring Jack Reacher; Echo Park is the newest Michael Connelly police procedural starring Harry Bosch. Both are airport books that demand little of a reader [...]

Alien Nation: Another Urban Legend?

OK, you want more friends, more involvement with your community, and more contact with you neighbors. Where are you better off living — in the buzz of the city or out in the socially alienating suburbs? I’m a city guy from the burbs — which are the butt of contemporary sociology. Bob Putnam’s Bowling Alone [...]