Marty Manley on economics, politics, technology, and culture

Classic Jam

How the Kindle Helps Destroy Textbooks

When Bill Clinton was elected President in the early 1990's, encyclopedias were a $1.2 billion dollar business in the US. The best encyclopedia, Britannica, owned half of the market and advertised "more than 80 Nobel laureates" among its contributors. A Britannica set cost over $1,000. They were sold door to door by over 2,000 commissioned [...]

The US Auto Hospice

Today the White House issued its assessment of the GM and Chrysler turnaround plans. To summarize: Chrysler has 30 days to live. It is being given palliative care only and physicians are under medical directive to not revive the patient. Fiat, it's slightly less dead companion, will either marry Chrysler or let it slip into [...]

Billionaire Amazon CEO works in his own warehouse.

He looks like a leprechaun and laughs like a hyena, but do not ever underestimate Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Back in 2006, Amazon accounted for 5.1% of all online sales. Now it accounts for 6% and it's cash flow more than doubled. The company ranks 8th in the Fortune 500 for ten year [...]

Employees: Free to Choose?

As befits a vanguard organization. Espresso Workers Local One was ahead of its time. It was a project of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or Wobblies), a  bunch of colorful commies who took their class struggle fully caffeinated and with a healthy dose of sugar. We organized the local in Santa Cruz [...]

Bicentennial of Heroes

Today two of my heroes celebrate their 200th birthdays. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on February 12, 1809.  Neither Lincoln nor Darwin were especially popular during their lifetimes and for different reasons, both were often caricatured as apes. Lincoln may be remembered as our greatest President, but he was also one of [...]

Economic Collapse: Understanding the Triple Whammy

We are in the middle of three economic crises. Although it would be preferable to handle and attack of food poisoning, a vicious cold, and the flu separately,  we got all three at the same time. The patient is feverish, heaving, and has not yet seen the worst of it. They are related economic diseases, [...]

Prose When Poetry Was Due

What a sight! More than a million jubilant people jammed into the National Mall to watch history pivot. Hundreds of millions more watched or listened to Obama from all over the world. Obama delivered a fine inaugural address but oddly, he chose prose over poetry. Instead of words to lift souls, we got a sermon [...]

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 [...]

Revolution in Iowa

Click here for a narrated photo album of the trip. ————————————————————————————— Where but America can a politician with no obvious advantages apart from being well-organized, energetic, thoughtful, and eloquent go from unknown to political powerhouse in a few short years? A race with more than a dozen candidates is now focused on Barack Obama and [...]

The 2008 Iowa Caucuses

Click here for a narrated photo album of the trip. ————————————————————————————— At Thanksgiving over turkey I realized that the 2008 Iowa caucuses were going to be such an incredible political showdown that I had to go out and see it for myself. Both parties are hosting their most open Presidential primaries in memory — no [...]

Rethinking the War on Drugs

Few people realize that the United States imprisons more of our own people than any other country. We have more than two million citizens behind bars, the highest absolute and per capita rate of incarceration in the world. In 2005, we put 737 people in jail for every 100,000 residents. In Russia the number was [...]

Why Resources Don’t "Run Out"

In April of 2006, oil crossed $70/barrel for the first time. I attended a talk at my kid’s school given by Dan Kammen, a first-rate environmentalist who teaches at UC Berkeley. Noting that oil prices had just hit a new high, Kammen asked the crowd of well-fed East Bay liberals how many of us thought [...]

"Don't tell me that this is the best America can do."

Last year I got in touch with a friend who had backed Alibris in its very early days. At the time he invested, he warned me that he could be "pathologically intense" and he had occasionally proven his point. A man with Twain’s "pen warmed up in hell", he had written a book that had [...]

Protect Income, not Industries, Companies, or Jobs

Suppose we tried to improve our economic security and well-being by making it illegal for any employer to fire any employee for any reason. Over time, our strategy would backfire. We would become less secure because we would be less competitive as our companies lost out to foreign businesses with more flexible cost structures. As [...]

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 [...]

Perspective on Global Warming

Each day, humans pump two billion pounds of carbon into earth’s atmosphere — the industrial exhaust from activities that have dramatically improved our lives. The extent to which the earth’s climate is changing more than it would change anyway, how much warming is a valid scientific concern vs. noise in very complex models, the contribution [...]

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 [...]

The Speech

It is by a considerable distance the finest American speech of the twentieth century. In its staging and phrasing, it consciously evoked the finest American speech ever, delivered nearly one hundred years earlier nearly one hundred miles away. Watch it, or read Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech to hundreds of thousands of people who gathered [...]

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 [...]