Workaholics and redistribution: Some people like working more than others

Apr 302012

Via Reihan Salam, here’s a bit from Greg Mankiw:

one reason that people differ in their incomes is that some people care more about having a high income than others…

Bryan [Caplan] goes on to suggest that to the extent this is true, it weakens the case for income redistribution.

He is absolutely right.  Most of the literature on optimal taxation and redistribution, following Mirrlees, assumes homogeneous preferences.  But Matthew Weinzierl has a recent paper on preference heterogeneity, which shows “ to the extent that variation in income is due to preference differences rather than productivity differences, the optimal extent of redistribution is lower, and the neglect of preference heterogeneity biases the results of conventional optimal tax analyses in favor of redistribution of income.”

Sure, but what about the flip side? Call it the striver phenomenon. Preferences for working aren’t homogeneous either. To the extent that some people get more utility out of working at a given task than others that should recommend relatively more redistribution, no?

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Algorithms writing news stories? How unambitious

Apr 282012

Are algorithms the future of news writing? Wired had an interesting article on that topic last week, focusing on a company called Narrative Science that is already doing it. Here’s the excerpt Wired provides from a Narrative Science story:

Friona fell 10-8 to Boys Ranch in five innings on Monday at Friona despite racking up seven hits and eight runs. Friona was led by a flawless day at the dish by Hunter Sundre, who went 2-2 against Boys Ranch pitching. Sundre singled in the third inning and tripled in the fourth inning … Friona piled up the steals, swiping eight bags in all …

I know as a writer I’m expected to either cower in fear or boast that no algorithm can ever spin prose like mine. But I had a totally different reaction. At the point where algorithms are handling the news, why are we still using news stories?

The news story is, from an informational perspective, pretty unsophisticated. It’s a block of text, a headline, some tags. There’s barely any structure or metadata.

But for an algorithm to be able to report the news it would seem that you pretty much have to impose this kind of structure on the information, and it’s clear from Wired that that’s what Narrative Science does:

Narrative Science’s writing engine requires several steps. First, it must amass high-quality data. That’s why finance and sports are such natural subjects…

…So Narrative Science’s engineers program a set of rules that govern each subject, be it corporate earnings or a sporting event. But how to turn that analysis into prose? The company has hired a team of “meta-writers,” trained journalists who have built a set of templates. They work with the engineers to coach the computers to identify various “angles” from the data…

…Then comes the structure. Most news stories, particularly about subjects like sports or finance, hew to a pretty predictable formula, and so it’s a relatively simple matter for the meta-writers to create a framework for the articles. To construct sentences, the algorithms use vocabulary compiled by the meta-writers.

My question is this: Why, when you’ve imposed all this structure on the information do you package it in such a “dumb” format? Yeah, I get that people are accustomed to reading news articles, and if you experiment with some new information format you risk users not understanding or embracing it.

But is there any reason to think that the news story is the ideal way to take in information? Yes, humans like narrative. But they’ll get that in magazine journalism. The basic news item – who won a game, what happened to a stock – doesn’t need to be digested as a story.

That’s why we have headlines, that’s why we use bullet points and bold stuff.

As Google’s Richard Gingras recently said:

“Do we not deserve to rethink the architecture of what a ‘story’ is, the form of presentation and narrative to meet the needs of people who are consuming, not just by articles?”

If you have an algorithm smart enough to parse events happening in the world and translate it into structured data you ought to be dreaming a little bigger about how to present it to your audience. The upside down pyramid format worked when turning news into data would have been another step. Now that’s already done as a necessity of algorithmic news.

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Como se dice… bias?

Apr 212012

One of the coolest paper abstracts I’ve read, via MR, presented without comment:

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

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Where’s the 400 word version of NYT’s Walmart bribery story?

Apr 212012

It’s been just a couple months since the media world debated whether Forbes writer Kashmir Hill went overboard in her curation of an NYT story on Target’s predictive analytics. Basically, Hill slapped a way better headline on the piece, pulled in a bunch of quotes, added some of her own prose, and got a ton of traffic.

Oh, and her piece was much shorter.

What did NYT learn? Apparently nothing. They have an awesome long form piece up today about Walmart’s consistent record of bribery in Mexico. It’s a damning piece executed to perfection. It’s also really, really long.

So why doesn’t NYT have a 400 word version published alongside it?

I love longform journalism, but even if every other reader did too, we all tend to read longform stuff about the issues we care most about. This is an important news item that falls outside of my core interests, and I want to know the basics. No doubt there are a lot of other readers who feel the same way.

In my case I read about 60% and skimmed the rest, but plenty of other readers are going to end up on the HuffPo version that captures the story in a few hundred words.

Why doesn’t the NYT beat them to the punch? The longform narrative obsessives and those with deep interest in Mexico, corruption, corporate citizenship, etc. will still read the long version.

But to not offer the bite size option is to cede an opportunity. You’ve already done all the hard reporting. Take even just a few minutes to think about the product.

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Facebook does NOT make us lonely

Apr 142012

I have a response to The Atlantic‘s cover story Does Facebook Make Us Lonely? up at BostInno. Here’s a snippet:

Is Facebook making us lonely? That’s the question posed by The Atlantic‘s new cover story, and if you’re interested in learning more about the nature of loneliness and its prevalance in American life, I recommend you give it a read. But if you’re looking for proof that Facebook and the internet more broadly are making us lonely, be prepared for disappointment.

There’s a lot of good information about the psychology of loneliness in the piece, but while author Stephen Marche isn’t quite so unequivocal in his conclusion, the article safely answers the question posed by its title: No, Facebook isn’t making us lonely.

Go give the rest a read and let me know what you think.

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One Image All Policy Students Should Be Familiar With

Mar 132012

Apropos of nothing, I was thinking about Lessig’s Code 2.0 today, and was reminded just how useful one simple image is. It’s something anyone who thinks about public policy – and really social problems more broadly – should be familiar with:

Policy (law) is just one way to solve problems. Incentives (market) are another. Then there are norms and architecture. But as we shift online – and this is Lessig’s main point – architecture is something we have control of. Whereas in the physical world, architecture is constrained, in the digital world it is entirely shaped by us. As we seek to solve problems with technology, this image is worth bearing in mind.

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All scoops are not equal: Linking back to the source that broke the news

Feb 252012

At Boing Boing:

MG Siegler complains that the Wall Street Journalfailed to credit him when covering a story he earlier scooped at TechCrunch: Apple Acquires Chomp.

The Wall Street Journal Is Fucking Bullshit

Earlier today, I broke some news.

I don’t typically do this anymore given my new job. But from time to time this will happen. But if you read The Wall Street Journal, you’d never know. Why’s that? Because they’re fuckheads who don’t credit actual sources of information.

Boing Boing’s Rob Beschizza says no because the WSJ reporter got the source herself, and because breaking the news doesn’t make you part of the story.

Mathew Ingram and Tim Carmody are debating this on Twitter as I type. Here’s my take…

The way I think about this is simply in terms of what we want the news ecosystem to reward, and what needs to be specially incentivized. And that’s how we decide how to create professional ethics. They’re ideally a means of furthering good journalism.

And Boing Boing correctly points out that being the first source gives you a first mover advantage and that in some cases is enough.

In my view the ecosystem already has plenty of incentive to be speedy; we don’t need to do anything extra to reward speed. What we do need to reward is journalists taking the time to uncover truly novel information that wouldn’t otherwise have become public (not that this is its only function, and not to encourage hyper-transparency, but still).

So if someone breaks the news on something that was going to be public soon anyway, I don’t see any reason to encourage a special obligation to link back, provided you can get your own source lined up, even in cases where getting that scoop took a lot of work.

For example, if you break a story about some feature on the latest iPad a day before it comes out or whatever (can you tell I don’t follow gadget news?) that might be a really big break, and it might require a lot of work, but if another reporter can subsequently get a direct source to confirm it why do we need to encourage a link to the original source? We don’t really need to go out of our way to incent that kind of coverage via professional ethics.

If, however, someone uncovers a genuinely novel item around, say, the use of drones by the U.S. government in Pakistan, where it seems possible that it wouldn’t have otherwise have become public in the near term, and where it seems likely to have taken at least some significant effort by that reporter, that’s where we should encourage a link back. Because that’s the kind of journalism we need more of.

You can plug in your own example of the kind of journalism you want to incent in the above graf and see how my theory fits for you. And again, I don’t mean this post to encourage some sort of hyper-transparency where getting new info out is just always a complete good. But I want to get beyond vague talk of “courtesy” and create a professional ethic for the digital era that attempts to promote the journalism we want, not just bolster reporters egos (and careers) based on any old scoop.

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Question for Jarvis: How will we pay for NYT’s Foxconn coverage?

Feb 202012

Chinese manufacturing giant Foxconn claims to be raising its wages and cutting overtime, and it seems fair to attribute at least some of that to NYT’s excellent coverage of Apple’s manufacturing there, which put some pressure on them. Elsewhere on the internet Jeff Jarvis explains why he insists that news become profitable, rather than relying on nonprofit models. Jarvis:

I am certain that there is not enough charity in the nation to support the journalism it needs… I also believe they are more likely to build better journalistic products, services, and platforms if they are accountable to the marketplace.

So my question – a genuine one – is how Jarvis thinks the NYT’s iPhone manufacturing coverage fits into this. I can think of a few possibilities of how it might.

1. He believes the market will directly support this kind of work

I find this hard to believe. Shirky has written that this kind of investigative work never made money, but back before news was un-bundled, ads that were sold against articles about sports, the classifieds, coupons, etc. and could help subsidize this sort of stuff.

No doubt many people read the NYT pieces, but they must have cost a ridiculous amount to produce. So I’m skeptical of this one, but perhaps Jarvis disagrees.

2. He believes the market will indirectly subsidize this kind of work via branding

In my mind, the best retort to Shirky’s point that the news was always subsidized is to argue that papers like NYT gain an indirect benefit with their credible reporting. Sure, when readers got the paper they looked at sports and lighter stuff, but they chose to buy such a premier paper in the first place in part to associate themselves with the seriousness of the brand.

That gets harder in the current un-bundled environment, but it may still hold. Maybe I mostly go to Vanity Fair to read celebrity profiles, but the reason I can justify it is because they do serious journalism too. Jarvis could argue that this kind of indirect brand subsidy will make the Foxconn reporting a market necessity.

3. The market won’t support it, so this is one of the things nonprofits should do

Jarvis isn’t against nonprofit news. He just doesn’t want to be over reliant on it. So he could say “yep, this is one of those things that ProPublica is going to do. Just don’t think that model props up all of journalism.”

4. ???

Of course, it’s quite likely that Jarvis’s answer is none of these things. But I’d love to hear it.

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Gizmodo’s take on objectivity is regrettable

Feb 182012

I’ve got plenty of complaints regarding the sort of he-said-she-said faux objectivity that has overwhelmed much of the traditional media, and I’ve written as much here on the blog. It’s Jay Rosen’s “quest for innocence” – the desire to be blameless that drives impartiality off the deep end to the point where it hurts readers. And at the philosophical level I recognize that “objectivity” in the abstract is impossible.

Fine. But the basic premise behind journalistic objectivity still has tremendous value. So it’s a shame to see Gizmodo editor Matt Buchanan trashing it in a post today. Here’s the opening:

Gizmodo is not objective. It never has been, I don’t think. And I hope it never will be. Because the point isn’t to be something as meaningless—and frankly, false—as objective. The point is to tell the truth.

As long we’re going to get philosophical, the whole notion of “the truth” is itself problematic. But in the context of journalism the point of “objectivity” is to tell the truth. And to appreciate that the truth is often very tricky, so a special ethic is required that is deeply skeptical of truth claims and devoted to exploring competing truth claims.

But Gizmodo ignores this and says:

But objectivity, very often, is bullshit. Even science, which proclaims to be objective more than any other discipline, is very often not, unable to decide whether or not coffee will kill you—or more tragically, has been systematically deployed over and over in history in the service of racism and misogyny. Objectively speaking, the earth was flat and the center of the universe, for a very long time.

Presumably some sort of honest Gizmodo ethic that just calls ‘em like it sees ‘em would have totally gotten that whole round earth thing right off the bat.

It gets worse.

Oh, and then there’s “bias.” What we hear about the most. That we’re biased about one product or another. What is an “unbiased” review of technology, or assessment of anything? A list of specifications, numbers jammed together with acronyms? What good does that do anybody?

I take from this that the author just doesn’t really spend much time thinking about bias. Here again it’s just not that hard, and it goes back to the point about telling the truth. Bias is about people making clearly false judgments in a systematic way. It’s measurable against broadly agreed upon truth claims, and in some cases it can be tempered by good practices of thought.

Journalistic objectivity is about a deep commitment to truth-telling paired with an acknowledgement of the pervasive power of bias that then leads to a skepticism of truth claims, which naturally breeds some interest in competing truth claims.

How does that work in practice when the quest for innocence is removed? I continue to go back to this great Jim Henley post describing the “blog-reporter ethos” which he sees as basically the same of that of a magazine writer:

* original reporting on first-hand sources
* a frankly stated point-of-view
* tempered by a scrupulous concern for fact
* an effort to include a fair account of differing perspectives
* ending in a willingness to plainly state conclusions about the subject

This isn’t that hard (well it’s hard to do, but it’s not that hard to grasp as a concept). We don’t just need transparency. And we don’t need the concept of objectivity to be so trashed that we can’t rebuild it.

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