Monthly Archives: October 2009

A friend was kind enough to send me this post about bottom-up thinking in development economics: What must we do to end world poverty? There has been a search for sixty years for the right answer. Now most economists confess … Continue reading →

I have mixed feelings about the news that my former colleague and co-blogger Adam Thierer is the new president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. On the one hand, I know he’ll do a great job for PFF. He did … Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago, Mike Masnick pointed to an interesting post-mortem of the Rocky Mountain News by John Temple, a former RMN staffer: We knew the web was a place we needed to be, but we didn’t have a clear … Continue reading →

My friend Sarah makes a point I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of myself: Bad charters don’t stay open indefinitely because no one has to enroll. Not everyone will necessarily pull kids out of a bad charter, but new people will … Continue reading →

Some excellent bottom-up thinking on education policy from Matt Yglesias: There’s substantial variation in the performance of different charter [schools]. What you need to do is identify schools that consistently perform poorly and shut them down. Then you create space … Continue reading →

Jerry Brito’s new podcast is even better when I’m not the guest. His latest episode features Michael Sawyer, of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, who has written about the User-Generated Content Principles that were negotiated between copyright holders … Continue reading →

Yesterday I attended a panel here at Princeton featuring three and a half right-of-center thinkers: Daniel Larison, Virginia Postrel, Ross Douthat, and David Frum. I say three and a half because Postrel warmed my heart by beginning her comments with … Continue reading →

There’s an important link between my app store and network management posts from last week: they’re both examples of filtering processes that don’t scale. There’s a fundamental difference between an recommendation process, in which a variety of firms offer competing … Continue reading →

A couple of people left interesting comments in response to mypost about the problems with “app stores.” Here’s my former colleague Adam Thierer: There needs to be some sense of proportionality here, at least about the iPhone (I can’t speak … Continue reading →

Here’s one developer’s perspective on Apple’s treatment of developers, from this summer: The last session of WWDC ‘09 yesterday was about publishing on the App Store. The content of sessions is under NDA, so I can’t tell you what it … Continue reading →