Frank Hecker

A summary of Peter Thiel’s arguments in his Stanford class on startups. Includes a link to the detailed class notes taken by the author of this column. The full set of notes is well worth reading by anyone interested in startups and the future of economic innovation.

A proposed approach for formatting datasets for easier manipulation and analysis. I should look into doing this for any future projects of this type.

I don’t know if this will be useful to me, but I spent some time tracking down the reference so thought I should record it.

Nicholas Carr on why innovation seems to have stagnated: The innovation being rewarded is for improvements at the upper levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. Invent new ways to connect to friends? You win. Invent new technologies that don’t directly impact people’s inner selves? It’s a tough slog.

Some points here: First, the argument is obviously overdrawn, given that innovation in other areas is still occurring and still being rewarded. However Carr’s point is on the *relative* rewards and attention to different areas, and I think in this sense his argument is plausible: Mark Zuckerberg gets on the cover of magazines and has a movie made about himself, while (for example) the folks who invent new energy technologies don’t.

Second, this ties in to my previous comments about Edward Conard’s “we need to direct increased fractions of total income and wealth to innovators” argument. If we take Carr’s argument as true, this would simply cause the “popular” forms of innovation to be even more highly rewarded than they are now, while the “unpopular” forms would still receive less attention.

Finally, Carr’s argument applies to the U.S. and other countries at a similar level of social and economic development. We’d expect it to be less salient for developing countries like China, India, etc., and thus we’d expect to see more attention paid to and innovation occurring at the “lower” levels of technology in such countries, especially with respect to what Carr calls the “technologies of prosperity”. Arguably this is indeed the case.

Do we need increased inequality to drive increased innovation? Edward Conard makes the case. I haven’t read his book, but right off the bat I can see two problems with this theory in terms of achieving Conard’s stated goal:

First, not everyone capable of great innovation is motivated primarily by money. (This is why there are still theoretical physicists and mathematician who don’t work for hedge funds.)

Second, the more money goes to reward ostensible innovation, the more tempting it will be to people who really do care primarily about money, even to the exclusion of almost everything else, including innovation. Hence it’s likely more effort would go into “innovation” that really isn’t (but has a plausible enough narrative to attract gullible investors), “innovation” that is unproductive or even actively harmful (e.g., many financial “innovations”), and even “innovation” in outright fraud.

These issues may or may not be addressed in Conard’s book—I should take a look at it sometime. But if they’re not addressed then I’ll remain skeptical of this and similar arguments.

The dilemma of the moment in libertarian philosophy: Does justification of social institutions (most notably including the market) rest on their positive effect on the (working) poor (the BHL approach), or rather on a chain of reasoning based on rights of self-ownership, the non-aggression principle, and similar considerations (the “hard libertarian” approach)?

Maybe someday I’ll get tired of Wordpress and decide to self-host my own blog again. And if I do, here are some options. (But not Blosxom: been there, done that.)

Not sure all of these are truly must-reads, but what the hey.

Hundreds of reviews of books on topics I’m interested in. At first glance definitely looks like a useful resource. (Via Will Wilkinson)

A new high school in New York City focused on teaching programming.