There are so many wannabe Public Intellectuals who are so insecure (or poorly bred) that they are hyper-aggressive, as quick to deliberately give offense as they are to deliberately take offense and so up in your face with the "I'm smart, acknowledge I'm smart" inferiority that they're just no fun to be around.
Then there's Irving.*
He writes like he's talking to a friend who either knows this stuff or can get up to speed damn quick.
Here's his latest (Apr. 8):
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the basic measure of a country’s overall economic output based on the market value of all the goods and services the country produces. Most measures of economic performance used by government officials to inform their policies and decisions are based on GDP figures. But, many concerns have been raised about the adequacy of GDP-based measurements given the major structural changes that economies around the world have been going through over the past few decades.
GDP is essentially a measure of production. While suitable when economies were dominated by the production of physical goods, GDP does not adequately capture the growing share of services and the production of increasingly complex solutions that characterize advanced economies. Nor does it reflect important economic activity beyond production, such as income, consumption and living standards.*I intro'd the February post with:
A few years ago, a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress led by Nobel-prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen was convened to look at the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress.
“What we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed, decisions may be distorted . . .,” it noted in its report issued in September of 2009. “So too, we often draw inferences about what are good policies by looking at what policies have promoted economic growth; but if our metrics of performance are flawed, so too may be the inferences that we draw.”
The Commission recommended complementing classical measures of GDP and economic production with additional measurements that captured people’s well being, as well as factoring in measurements of sustainability to help reflect the evolution of the economy into the future.
Over the past decade, a new set of concerns have arisen with the evolution of the Internet-based digital economy. How do you measure the value of the explosive amount of free information goods available over the Internet, including Wikipedia articles, Google maps, Linux open source software and You Tube videos? “We know less about the sources of value in the economy than we did 25 years ago,” wrote economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders in MIT’s Sloan Review:
“We see the influence of the information age everywhere, except in the GDP statistics. More people than ever are using Wikipedia, Facebook, Craigslist, Pandora, Hulu and Google. Thousands of new information goods and services are introduced each year. Yet, according to the official GDP statistics, the information sector (software, publishing, motion picture and sound recording, broadcasting, telecom, and information and data processing services) is about the same share of the economy as it was 25 years ago - about 4%. How is this possible? Don’t we have access to more information than ever before?”In Why it Matters that the GDP Ignores Free Goods, a talk delivered at the 2012 Techonomy conference, Brynjolfsson said that despite being in the midst of a major technology revolution, official government statistics don’t include the value of digital goods and you could thus conclude that the information sector has not grown at all since the1960s. “Obviously, there’s some major measurement problems in the way we keep our statistics, and that’s a real problem because, as the saying goes, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.”...MORE
I'll start out by committing the logical fallacy of Appeal to Authority:
...I am Visiting Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division; Executive-in-Residence at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress; Senior Fellow at the Levin Institute of the State University of New York; and Adjunct Professor in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Imperial College Business School. I am a member of the Board of Directors of Inno360, ID³ and CNRI, the InnoCentive Advisory Board, the Visiting Committee for the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, and the Advisory Board of USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab.Yeah, he probably qualifies as a Public Intellectual.
I served on and later became co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 to 2001, and was a founding member of the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council in 1986. I am a former member of University of Chicago Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratories, the Board of Overseers for Fermilab, and BP's Technology Advisory Council. A few years ago, I was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences....
And some of his recent posts:
