Ged Carroll

Category: economics | 經濟學 | 경제학 | 経済

Economics or the dismal science was something I felt that I needed to include as it provides the context for business and consumption.

Prior to the 20th century, economics was the pursuit of gentleman scholars. The foundation of it is considered to be Adam Smith when he published is work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith outlined one of the core tenets of classical economics: each individual is driven by self-interest and can exert only a negligible influence on prices. And it was the start of assumptions that economists model around that don’t mirror real life all the time.

What really is a rational decision maker? Do consumers always make rational decisions? Do they make decisions that maximise their economic benefit?

The problem is that they might do actions that are rational to them:

  • Reducing choice when they are overwhelmed
  • Looking for a little luxury to comfort them over time. Which was the sales of Cadbury chocolate and Revlon lipstick were known to rise in a recession
  • Luxury goods in general make little sense from a ration decision point of view until you realise the value of what they signal
  • Having a smartphone yet buying watches. Japanese consumers were known to still buy watches to show that they care about the time to employers when they could easily check their smartphone screen

All of which makes the subject area of high interest to me as a marketer. It also explains the amount of focus now being done by economists on the behavioural aspect of things.

  • Malayan emergency + more things

    Psychological Warfare of the Malayan Emergency – interesting read; I wonder what C.C. Too would have made of the Leave and Remain campaigns? It is amazing how much of things in the UK goes back to Borneo and the Malayan emergency. The COIN strategies that were successful in the Malayan emergency were applied time and time again

    Reliance Jio has become the world leader in feature phones in just 10 months — Quartz – The strong growth in Jio, clubbed with the return of the Nokia brand, has helped the global feature phone market grow 38% year-on-year in January-March 2018, Counterpoint said. India contributed to nearly 43% of all feature phone sales during the first three months of 2018.

    Highlights from CCS Insight’s Predictions – Manufacturers’ vision for smart TVs fails. Despite their efforts to introduce apps and smart features, makers of smart TVs have failed to convince customers, who still use them as “dumb” screens. They buy TVs mainly based on design and picture quality, viewing the smartness only as a by-product. – More consumer behaviour related content here.

    The Bill Gates Line – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – interesting essay on the nature of monopoly power, platforms and aggregators

    Microsoft and Publicis unveil Marcel, an AI-based productivity platform for the ad giant | TechCrunch – interesting narrow expert apps rather than a general intelligence

    Qualcomm launches Snapdragon 710 platform in mobile AI, neural networking push | ZDNet – further enhancing neural networks on smartphones

    New Sony CEO to Detail Shift Away From Gadgets in Mid-Term Plan – Bloomberg – huge implication for innovation though

    US-China tech wars threaten global sector disruption | FT – strikes at the heart of China’s ambitions and is likely to curb revenues as well as disrupt supply chains at foreign multinationals, many of which see the country as a key market. But it is also prompting a rethink at the corporate level in China, with tech companies looking to develop their own chips (pay wall)

    Is Douyin the Right Social Video Platform for Luxury Brands? | Jing Daily – Douyin insider Fabian Bern shared that 85 percent of the app’s users are under 24 years old, over 70 percent are female, and the majority are from upper class families living in first tier cities

    Social credit system must bankrupt discredited people: former official – Global Times – China’s social credit system had blocked more than 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed train trips by the end of April.

    An improved social credit system was needed so that “discredited people become bankrupt,” Hou Yunchun, former deputy director of the development research center of the State Council

    Opinion | What the Microsoft Antitrust Case Taught Us – The New York Times – interesting how what would have isolated sporadic criticism of the big four internet giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google is now morphing into criticism and calls for remedy on a regular basis. Behavioural change from a marketing perspective is usually driven by reach and repetition. It feels like the ground is being prepared for legislation or a court challenge a few years from now

    A look back: The Bloomberg Keyboard | Bloomberg Professional Services – really interesting evolution of design

    The surprising return of the repo man – The Washington Post – “So much of America is just a heartbeat away from a repossession — even good people, decent people who aren’t deadbeats,” said Patrick Altes, a veteran agent in Daytona Beach, Fla. “It seems like a different environment than it’s ever been.”

    How Judea Pearl Became One of AI’s Sharpest Critics – The Atlantic – Three decades ago, a prime challenge in artificial-intelligence research was to program machines to associate a potential cause to a set of observable conditions. Pearl figured out how to do that using a scheme called Bayesian networks. Bayesian networks made it practical for machines to say that, given a patient who returned from Africa with a fever and body aches, the most likely explanation was malaria. In 2011 Pearl won the Turing Award, computer science’s highest honor, in large part for this work.

    But as Pearl sees it, the field of AI got mired in probabilistic associations. These days, headlines tout the latest breakthroughs in machine learning and neural networks. We read about computers that can master ancient games and drive cars. Pearl is underwhelmed. As he sees it, the state of the art in artificial intelligence today is merely a souped-up version of what machines could already do a generation ago: find hidden regularities in a large set of data. “All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting,” he said recently.

  • Strategic News Service & things this week

    Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service; a George Gilderesque subscription newsletter, the likes of which were very popular in the mid to late 1990s. The Strategic News Service process is an interesting ‘anti algorithmic’ analysis in action. A counter point to the world that Google now represents, I don’t buy all that Anderson and the Strategic News Service says, but this is very interesting to watch.

    The synthetic voice of synthetic intelligence should sound synthetic. Successful spoofing of any kind destroys trust. When trust is gone, what remains becomes vicious fast.

    — Stewart Brand via Simon Willison. It seemed very appropriate when considering the Google Duplex demonstrations from the other week.

    It’s Nice That | Gucci and Frieze team up on major new video series, The Second Summer of Love – well worth a view

    Singapore’s utopian clean looking city and high quality Japanese animation are a marriage made in heaven. Makoto Shinkai directed this for the forthcoming Singapore Thomson East Coast Line on behalf of Japanese construction giant Taisei Corporation. More Japan related content here.

    This would usually be the part where I would talk about how I am looking forward to Deadpool. But I won’t. I wanted to marvel at the collective hullucination of Deadpool marketing. Deadpool marketing isn’t trying to get you to go and see the film, but instead brings elements of the film to you. Once you are properly tuned in, it then makes perfect sense to see the film. The problem is that there are so many fragments from DVD rewraps to teasers and TV appearances that it would be impossible to capture or choose a favourite.

    Instead I am going to share a video of the Korean show King of Masked Singer, where Ryan Reynolds preformed Tomorrow from the musical Annie in a unicorn mask.

    Fans in show panel and the audience lost their shit

  • River Elegy & other things this week

    River Elegy

    River Elegy (河殇) is a six-part documentary broadcast on China’s largest TV station CCTV1, in 1988. River Elegy is a landmark documentary, a more innocent naive Chinese viewpoint that emerged as the country opened up. China and its civilisation has existed around the Pearl and Yellow rivers for 1000s of years, rather like the Rhine and the Elba in Germany.

    China had started to open up to the world after the cultural revolution and intellectuals started to learn about how different the west was. River Elegy compares the old ways and Chinese gains in civilisation over thousands of years, with the modern world. In retrospect the River Elegy attacks on traditional culture and Confucianism mirror the rejection of tradition in the cultural revolution. The River Elegy series spurred debate and was seen to be criticism of what the creators perceived to be a slow-moving communist party.

    At the time, intellectuals in China were avidly reading the works of western thinkers like John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler who provided a vision of a rollercoaster centrist techno-utopian future. I get the attraction to young intellectuals. In the 1980s, the future looked bright and technocratic.

    The thing that I find most interesting about it is the use of music, imagery and editing is almost psychedelic in its effect. It must have been mind blowing for the audience who tuned into it.

    A couple of people involved in the production of River Elegy whore about how it was created in Deathsong of the River – which is a great read. It is interesting to reflect how far this series is from the China of today. It overs an interesting contrast to Xi Thought in both content and presentation style.

    China and the World

    From a retro futuristic vision of China in River Elegy to the current day: China and the World: Recalibration and Realignment – YouTube. I put this on the background, its almost three hours long but very informative.

    Tian Jinqin – electronic instrument pioneer

    1980 Video of Tian Jinqin, “Originator of Chinese Electronic Music” | RADII China – China was slower on the uptake electronic music because of the cultural revolution. Tian Jinqin developed some interesting instruments based on traditional Chinese instruments as well as keyboards.

    NeXT logo

    NeXT logo presentation, by Paul Rand, for Steve Jobs | Logo Design Love – Steve Jobs on Paul Rand. The interesting thing for me is how Jobs talks through the brief in an interview. It was the model for client agency relationships with a high level of trust.

    Larry Levan

    Maestro – BOILER ROOM – great documentary about DJ/producer Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage. Levan is one of the people who shaped the modern dance sound. The film does a really good job of setting up the context from disco to house and goes on about other New York clubs like The Loft and The Gallery. It has a great soundtrack and some of the interviewees are fierce.

  • RSS renaissance + more news

    Now Is The Perfect Time For An RSS Renaissance | Neflabs – great read and a much needed request for a lean web. There has been a post-Google Reader RSS renaissance in terms of readers out there. My favourite reader of the RSS renaissance is Newsblur

    Here’s What Facebook Won’t Let You Post | WIRED – pretty grim read

    CIA agents in ‘about 30 countries’ tracked by technology, top official says – CNNPolitics – “Singapore’s been doing it for years,” she told CNN following her keynote speech on Sunday morning at the 2018 GEOINT Symposium, hosted by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. Meyerriecks did not elaborate with further examples. – It makes total sense that the CIA is building a ‘Google Maps’-style dead ground map of areas that they operate in using machine learning. More related content here.

    Chinese cult writer Chen Qiufan on pushing the boundaries of sci-fi | FT – good read with the obligatory name check of Liu Cixin (paywall)

    g2g, brb, and what the loss of early MSN language means | Dazed – interesting change in consumer behaviour as time spent online creeps upwards with the move towards ubiquitous connectivity

    P&G returns to YouTube but with a more selective mindset | Marketing Interactive – ultimately brands are powerless in the face of Google, Facebook and Amazon advertising if they insist on not running with a media neutral approach

    China opposes all forms of protectionism, commerce minister says – says market with high levels of implicit and explicit protection

    No, a keyboard app can’t ‘prevent tragedy from depression’ | Advertising | Campaign Asia – quite shocking claims

    Google’s new video ad format doesn’t need YouTube | Digital | Campaign Asia – interesting move

    AI in the UK white paper | House of Lords – (PDF)

    Microsoft gives up artificial intelligence sales over ethical concerns – interesting positioning, it would be good to get an understanding on on what the board would define as a bad actor

    After Sir Martin Sorrell: The Reckoning | LinkedIn – interesting analysis of the marketing sector, I disagree with the way that some of it hangs together

    Gchat could have saved Google the trouble of launching yet another messaging service. | Slate – what this forgets is that GChat ended up having a lot of bots and spam accounts. For me it was worse than Skype or Yahoo! Messenger at the time. I could see business historians highlighting this as a lost opportunity in the story of Alphabet

  • Erooms Law – jargon watch

    Erooms Law is a metaphor that compares other business processes to the virtuous circle of Moore’s Law. It is literally Moore’s Law in reverse. Industries have developed processes that are getting ever more expensive.  Once could consider that is inversely proportional to the way semiconductor manufacture  reduced the relative cost of computing power over time.

    Some see this as a potential opportunity for the use of computing in a sector to reduce costs. As with most circumstances, what seems like a great idea inside an Excel spreadsheet doesn’t work out in the real world. But that doesn’t stop the management consultants, investment bankers or venture capitalists from trying.

    Eroom’s Law and the pharmaceutical industry

    The poster child for Erooms Law cited would be the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry developing new drugs.

    Here’s how Nature Reviews Drug Discovery put it:

    Eroom’s Law indicates that powerful forces have outweighed scientific, technical and managerial improvements over the past 60 years, and/or that some of the improvements have been less ‘improving’ than commonly thought. The more positive anyone is about the past several decades of progress, the more negative they should be about the strength of countervailing forces. If someone is optimistic about the prospects for R&D today, they presumably believe the countervailing forces — whatever they are — are starting to abate, or that there has been a sudden and unprecedented acceleration in scientific, technological or managerial progress that will soon become visible in new drug approvals.

    You could argue that the defence industry would also fall into this, despite the benefits of technology. (The origins of the semiconductor industry lie in the development of missiles during the cold war. Integrated circuit technology is more robust and lighter than discrete transistors or vacuum tube based systems).

    Other areas were Erooms Law is prevalent include fintech or financial technology and the automotive sector, where massive assumptions are made about the rate of innovation in battery technology based on Moore’s Law rather than the rather prosaic improvements in materials science that underpin existing battery chemistry.

    More information

    Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency | Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (paywall)
    Eroom’s Law | In the Pipeline | Science magazine
    EROOM’s Law of Pharma R & D | buildingpharmabrands
    More posts on the pharmaceutical industry on this blog.