Readers of this blog will recall that the Sloan Foundation's funding of the NBER Economics of Digitization program was the impetus to starting this blog. Erik and Shane are among the leaders of that program. I am happy to announce today that a program that I will co-direct with Fiona Murray (MIT) has just been …
Richard Rosenbloom, in memory
Richard Rosenbloom passed away on October 26th. He was a gentle soul, a wonderful person, and a insightful scholar. He will be missed. I will miss him. I had the great fortune to meet him several times. The first of these meetings occurred when I was a student. Those first meetings were informal because his …
Not All the Economic News is Bad
The past decade has been terrible in terms of job growth and median wage growth, and sadly that was true even before it culminated in the worst recession since the 1930s. But not all the news is bad. Although it’s not much discussed, this has actually been the best decade since the 1960s for productivity …
A is for Apple
What do Steve Jobs and Chicago plumbers have in common? Apparently, they care about alphabetical order. Like the rest of the world, I have been reading Walter Isaacson's new biography of Jobs. In choosing the name Apple, Jobs says: I was on one of my fruitarian diets ... I had just come back from the …
Smaller and smaller books
Erik Brynjolfsson hasn't been blogging too often because over the last couple of months he has been book writing. He and Andrew McAfee have released their new book, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. If you think that is a wordy …
The Wi-Fi Journey
Behind every successful technology lie many quirky stories showing how it grew like a teenager or barely averted disaster. With the passage of time, most of those stories fade into obscurity or, at best, become parts of verbal explanations accompanying countless resumes. The few events that find their way into public discourse, if any do …
10 Years into the iPod Revolution
It is almost completely impossible to believe that 10 years ago today, one of the great revolutions in IT was launched. On October 23, 2001, Apple announced the iPod. To say it was rudimentary is an understatement. It had only 5GB of hard disk storage, as the size of a deck of cards and weighed …
US Broadband in Maps, Graphs, and some Bars
To be sure, most of us do not use government statistical reports as anything more than bedtime reading for inducing soporific reactions. It is cheaper than a sleeping pill. But those expectations would be too harsh for the most recent broadband report from the FCC. It contains a great deal of data, and it is …
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Science, with & without the Internet: Part II
Last week I looked at Michael Nielsen's new book, Reinventing Discovery, and, in particular, how science can deal with the broader citizenry using online tools. As it turns out, that is not where the book begins. Instead, Nielsen starts by looking at how scientists deal with each other. If you go back far enough, there …
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Accessing book sales data
People often ask me about the books I have written, "how many copies have been sold?" And it surprises them to find out that I have no idea. For instance, my book Parentonomics was published initially by UNSW Press and then MIT Press before being translated into, I think, 6 other languages each with their …
Digitopoly 