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.

  • Money out of China + more things

    So you want to get your money out of China? Cut out and keep edition | FT Alphaville – getting money out of China is notoriously difficult (paywall). More China related posts here.

    Big in Japan! Geomagnetic indoor positioning | Electronics EETimes – interesting deals by IndoorAtlas with Yahoo! Japan, SK Planet (Korean commerce service) and Baidu

    Ad Blockers and the Next Chapter of the Internet | HBR – retargeting blamed for the rise in ad blocking. Hopefully we’ll see advertising planning and targeting driven by marketing science rather than technological progress in the future. Article via Daniel Appelquist

    I, Cringely The FBI v. Apple isn’t at all the way you think it is – I, Cringely – interesting hypothesis

    Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo is now streaming on Pornhub | Dazed Digital – interesting channel to be used. Part of a wider ‘mainstreamisation’ of the platforms which has started with Diesel advertising on them

    Cisco Rolls 16nm ASICs | EE Times – interesting that Huawei is only 3.2% of data centre switches, I expect this to change over time; particularly in China and developing world countries

    Indonesia to Facebook, Google, and Twitter: Pay local taxes or we’ll block you – Last month Indonesian president Joko Widodo toured Silicon Valley and paid visits to the area’s tech giants. Now, it’s their turn to pay Indonesia something—namely, local taxes. – This could make the UK government’s settlement look foolish

    Scary Data – Trends in Malware, Phishing, Site Cleaning and Bad Networks – Wordfence – pretty damning data for Hong Kong Telecom in this analysis

    Technics Reveal Why The New SL-1200 Turntable Costs $4000 – Magnetic Magazine – destroying all that plant looks like an expensive mistake

    Why BlackBerry Is a Hit in Indonesia – Digits – WSJ – BBM 55m monthly active users, Facebook messenger & WhatsApp 50m MAUs, LINE 30m MAUs

    SFX Is Auctioning Off Beatport | HypeBot – not terribly surprising.

    Afternoonify – interesting search audit technology

  • Chinas Coming War With Asia

    Chinas coming war with Asia – provocative title

    Chinas Coming War With Asia: where do I start with a book title this inflammatory? I went to the trouble of reading the book twice before starting this review. In the end, the only conclusion I can come to is ‘Policy Faultlines in East Asia’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.

    Chinas coming war with Asia is one of those books that you shouldn’t judge too harshly by its cover, but by Jonathan Holsag’s writings.
    Untitled

    About the book

    Holsag marshals a huge range of facts and opinions within the book. If you want to have a basic understanding of the modern Chinese state, then this book is a good primer.

    He provides insight into the Chinese Communist’s Party’s policy cornerstone of territory maximisation. They were happy to put off their agenda for tactical advantage, but never gave up on their goals. China’s neighbours have similar inflexible policy goals. There is is no win-win solution. This is very interesting given the treaty

    Time has brought increased pressures. A fight for resources to fuel further growth and water rights conflicts. Relative declines in economic growth also fuels nationalistic politics. In China, nationalistic sentiments in citizens grew with prosperity. It has become convenient for politicians to tap into nationalistic sentiments.

    Holsag doesn’t attempt to provide a solution for de-escalation of these edges. His book only provides a macro-level understanding of the countries involved. For the reader who wants to understand Asia, Holsag’s book is an excellent primer.  More on Chinas Coming War With Asia by Jonathan Holsag. More book reviews here.

  • Priv fails + more things

    BlackBerry sold under 50,000 Priv units, Play Store data suggests | AndroidAuthority – its probably over this number as many BlackBerry Priv devices wouldn’t be allowed to download apps from the Play Store for enterprise security reasons, but it isn’t a blockbuster either. More on wireless related subjects here.

    Home Broadband 2015 | Pew Research Center – plateaued with some relying solely on mobile broadband WTF

    Markets in everything, tangled and untangled – real world self selecting gamefication

    Uber needs more drivers in China. A partnership with a state-owned carmaker will help – Quartz – Uber faces formidable competition in China, mainly from Didi Kuaidi; which explains why its trying to get some ‘vendor financing’ for its ‘non-employees’. It has done a similar deal with General Motors in the US

    In Net-a-Porter and Yoox Merger, a Fight Behind the Scenes – New York Times – (paywall)

    The Huawei Watch might be the smartwatch for me (REVIEW) – Tech in Asia – If you absolutely, positively, want a smartwatch, if you’re an Android user, and if you care about how the thing looks on your wrist, the Huawei Watch is close to the best option for you (it also works with iOS, although with limited functionality). It strikes just the right balance between usability and design, looking equally at home at a dinner party or a tech event. Unfortunately, it costs twice as much as most of its Android Wear competitors, between S$549 and S$649 (about US$399 in the States).

    Women Fuel China’s Fitness Craze – WSJ – reminds me of the ‘All in with my girls’ work done by B-M when I was there

    How 19 Big-Name Corporations Plan to Make Money Off the Climate Crisis | Mother Jones – silver linings in them clouds

    Here’s What We Need to Do to Get VR to Take Off | Andreessen Horowitz – or why non gaming content is likely to drive VR uptake first

    Can’t sign in to Google calendar on my Samsung refrigerator – Google Product Forums – a sign of things to come

    Why can’t China make a good ballpoint pen? | Marketplace.org – the metaphysics of quality with Chinese characteristics

  • Scratching + more things

    History of scratching

    A brief history of scratching | FACT magazine – a great piece on scratching but skips over many of the greats prior to Q-Bert et al such as Mr Mixx, Cash Money, DJ Supreme and DJ Pogo. Scratching went through massive changes from the mid-1980s to the mid 1990s. Q-Bert et al were standing on the shoulders of other scratching innovators

    Consumer behaviour

    Researchers reveal millennials will take a 25,000 photos of themselves in their lifetime | Daily Mail Online – lifeblogging or qualitative ‘quantified self’?

    Bill Drummond (of The KLF) fame did this really good talk about how the iPod (and you could add smartphones) have changed our relationship with music

    Marketing

    Tic-Tac have put together a great tie-in with local Hong Kong independent musicians and music festival Clockenflap (Hong Kong’s answer to Glastonbury). Budding artists can submit their own video with a chance to play at Clockenflap.

    FutureDeluxe did this great bit of CGI work for the adidas X Primeknit football boot.

    Media

    Cross Device Tracking Creates New Privacy Concerns, FTC Says | Advertising Age – “They do this under the veil of anonymous identifiers and hashed P.I.I. [personally-identifiable information], but these identifiers are still persistent and can provide a strong link to the same individual online and offline,” Ms. Ramirez said, in language that challenges the typical rhetoric from companies that track consumers.”Not only can these profiles be used to draw sensitive inferences about consumers, there is also a risk of unexpected and unwelcome use of data generated from cross device tracking” (paywall) – interesting that cross device tracking is seen as a ‘new privacy concern’ rather than an established one. This delay between regulatory attention and development is why cross device tracking companies have such an advantage over governments and consumers

    TBS is giving eSports its mainstream moment with new weekly program – Digiday – interesting move, US media following normal practice in Korea

    Retailing

    Here’s where teens shop as old favorite stores go extinct | Fusion – Malls still are super important to teen culture as physical spaces you can go to hangout without parents

    Security

    From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities | The Intercept – basically you have no privacy, presumably this would allow them to zoom in on Tor users at some point?

    Software

    Google faces new US antitrust scrutiny, this time over smartphones – CNET – the US antitrust scrutiny could turn to action that would  fragment Android distributions quite dramatically… More Google related content here.

  • Magic Leap + more things

    Magic Leap has shared an interesting concept video. Magic Leap that has technology which provides a more immersive experience, layered on top of the real world. It would be impressive if Magic Leap manages to pull it off. A demo are notorious for being the technology equivalent of snake oil salesmen who sell but can’t deliver. There’s even a name for it: vapour ware. I have no idea yet if Magic Leap is vapour ware. But the engineering challenges in terms of optics, software, power management and hardware are immense. More on web-of-no-web type experiences here.

    Once they have nailed the device, there is a requirement for content development. Lots of it. This also has implications for story telling.

    The Rise and Fall of China’s economy is a provocative title. The title was designed to be really good link bait rather than accurately reflecting the content of the video. The video actually does give a good background on how the Chinese economy has developed on a macro-level in a way that the interested non-economist would understand.

    I like the way Nestle has brought on board a gingerbread man character to advertise Coffee Mate in the US. There has been a move away from mascot-type figures in marketing in general. This is a really nice counterpoint to that trend.

    Nikon seem to be reaching out to millennials with this profile of a skateboard photographer, it is likely to appeal to a contingent of generation X too.

    It targets a very different type of photographer who would wouldn’t be impressed by the traditional photography ‘personalities’ from Rankin to Dave Lee Travis (Leica paid him good money back in the day, apparently he was interested in bird-watching).

    This is a world away from the first skating video shot by Stacy Paralta back in the mid 1980s, with grainy low-fi VHS cameras.

    Really nice mobile experience: Sync! Illumination lets you watch Tokyo Disneyland Electrical Parade from home on multiple phones