Monday, December 3, 2007

Creating Economic Opportunity At All Levels

My interest in economics from an academic perspective is based on my interest in economic development and how technology can can better peoples lives. The following set of stories touches upon all three of these concepts.

"Professor Anirudh Krishna of the Duke Center for International Development leads this collaborative project involving multiple scholars and institutions in the United States, India, Kenya, Uganda and Peru. Our primary research focuses on pathways into and out of poverty and utilizes a specialized methodology to understand poverty from the perspective of the poor themselves. The method, developed after extensive field investigations in India and Kenya, is discussed in the 'Methodology' link in terms of the steps that are followed. On this site you will find published and working papers generated from these investigations."

His work was highlighted in an article that appeared in two new newspapers, the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. The New York Times article headline focused on those Indians who had benefited from the Web 2.0 economy and their efforts to help others less fortunate through Professor Krishna's studies. The Tribune headline focused on the poor benefiting from the program created out of those studies by Professor Krishna Babajob.com

"Mr. Krishna found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs remain in poverty not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to find them. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks."

"Mr. Blagsvedt’s epiphany? “We need village LinkedIn!” he recalled saying, alluding to the professional networking site."

Another New York Times article demonstrates the impact the rapid economic change in India has had on India's social structure in giving women new independence.

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Getting Deeper Into Creative-Destruction

Also spent the weekend doing a bit more studying of economics in particular the concept of creative-destruction. I have added a few more websites to the MyStuff folder for creative-destruction. Finally got around to reading the Wikipedia articles on creative-destruction and on Joseph Alois Schumpeter again to get a better understanding. One disadvantage of the web over a printed book is that it is harder to get and in-depth understanding of a particular perspective. One advantage of the web over a printed book is being able to get multiple perspectives rather easily. Now have a fairly good idea of what Tyler Cowen and Schumpeter mean by creative destruction but need to get a better understanding of how others are using the term. Another concept I have been studying is the "COASE THEOREM" , which I learned about at a Freakonomics post.

Web 2.0 Explorations

Over the weekend I went back to learn some more about the Web 2.0 tools out there. I am now into tagging, especially del.icio.us and diigo. Lately, I have been taking a look at some of the other tagging systems out there like BlinkList and Ma.gnolia. Not sure if there is any advantage to having more than one system from an organizational perspective except for getting your message in front of more people. There is definitely a difference between the audiences of the various systems. Kiva has 44 users who have tagged the site under BlinkList, 99 on Ma.gnolia and 2,964 users on del.icio.us. The TED Talk by Dan Gilbert on Why are we Happy has 2 users on Blink, 5 users tagging it on Mag.nolia and 240 on del.icio.us. Blinklist and even more so Ma.gnolia state that they focus more on the social aspects of tagging. One user on Blinklist has 44 different sites with the happiness tag so it is possible to find connections but it's creating personal nodes rather than cognitive ones. One problem with all of these sites is that you have to have the right tag that the majority of other users have utilized. You can't look up the site name or address within these systems even if you know it. I am beginning to see more possibilities for the personal connections on a project basis though I still don't care about anybody's cats. Also took a look at SuperGlu. Superglu is designed to put all this together though I don't see any real advantage over what Blogger can do.