albatrosses v. salmon

I think that last Friday’s post on ideas being cheap ended up being less clear than I had hoped. Ironically, it’s because I tried to tackle too many ideas at once – which supports my main point, but which detracted from my ability to make it! So I’m going to have another go at just […]

meandering through an idea or two…

When Paul Krugman writes a blog post that is more academically oriented, he always labels it as ‘wonkish’ in an attempt to protect his general interest readers. So in that spirit, this post is ‘wonkish’. Very wonkish. Which is ironic given my exhortation for clarity yesterday, but that’s the way it goes… I quite like […]

ideas are cheap

I’ve had a strange week. I’ve spent a lot of it working around some network data so that I can analyse it. It’s for a consulting job, and the guy that collected it gave it to me in a state that was ….. not what I was looking for. So it’s been a bit of […]

persistent economic ties

There’s been a bit of a slow roll through the (mostly) academic blogs discussing a recent paper by Bronnenberg, Dhar & Dube from The Journal of Political Economy called “Brand History, Geography, and the Persistence of Brand Shares”. Here’s the abstract: We document evidence of a persistent “early entry” advantage for brands in 34 consumer […]

fail now! fail fast!

I grabbed a copy of an odd little book yesterday – it’s called Books vs Cigarettes by George Orwell. It’s a collection of six essays. They’re all pretty good (Orwell is always pretty readable), but I don’t see a lot of logic in assembling these particular essays into one book (the title essay is excellent […]