- If you have a blog and you write about potential research questions, write the question out clearly but give a wrong answer. This solves the problem I raised here.
- When I send an email to two people I feel bad for the person whose name I address second (“Dear Joe and Jane”) so I put it twice to make it up to them (“Dear Joe and Jane and Jane.”)
- If you have a rich country and a poor country and their economies are growing at the same rate you will nevertheless have rising inequality over time simply because, as is well documented, the poor have more kids.
- Are there arguments against covering contraception under health insurance that don’t also apply to covering vaccines?
- The most interesting news is either so juicy that the source wants it kept private or so important that the source wants to make it public. This is why Facebook is an inferior form of communication: as neither private nor fully public it is an interior minimum.
Cheap Talk
A blog about economics, politics and the random interests of forty-something professors
3 comments
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March 11, 2012 at 10:37 pm
Matt
last one is good
March 12, 2012 at 7:32 am
twicker
Actually, I like all of them, but I think the last one is incorrect for the, “so important,” information:
Most people (at least the ones I know) don’t naturally have a bully pulpit from which to announce the, “most interesting information.” Thus, we use Facebook, Twitter, etc. to try and explicitly make public that information far faster than we could if we sent individual e-mails to everyone on our contact list. Further, we provide others the ability to spread that information. Even if a regular citizen calls a reporter and tries to get it in the mainstream, putting the word out on Facebook first helps generate buzz. For example, if you want to set up a protest/rally somewhere, or get people to call/e-mail someone, or boycott a business, it helps to start on social media and expand from there (those aren’t “important news” until enough people have already bought into them).
In other words, sometimes, important news is an emergent phenomenon. That’s where Facebook comes in.
It’s a noisy solution (there’s also a lot of mediocre news, and news where one person thinks it’s important but almost no one else does), but there are gems in amongst the slag (to mix metaphors).
March 12, 2012 at 9:04 am
Anonymous
good point but twitter and google plus are more public than facebook