Year: 2013

Tom Simonite sees the online encyclopedia getting sclerotic:

The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia – and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation – as shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. … The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

But he acknowledges that the decline of participation is largely due to the anti-vandalism measures introduced in 2007, when high-profile hoaxes seemed to pose an existential threat to the project:

The project’s most active volunteers introduced a raft of new editing tools and bureaucratic procedures intended to combat the bad edits. They created software that allowed fellow editors to quickly survey recent changes and reject them or admonish their authors with a single mouse click. They set loose automated “bots” that could reverse any incorrectly formatted changes or those that were likely to be vandalism and dispatch warning messages to the offending editors.

The tough new measures worked. Vandalism was brought under control, and hoaxes and scandals became less common. … But those tougher rules and the more suspicious atmosphere that came along with them had an unintended consequence. Newcomers to Wikipedia making their first, tentative edits – and the inevitable mistakes – became less likely to stick around. Being steamrollered by the newly efficient, impersonal editing machine was no fun. The number of active editors on the English-language Wikipedia peaked in 2007 at more than 51,000 and has been declining ever since as the supply of new ones got choked off. This past summer, only 31,000 people could be considered active editors.

A portion of Max Richter’s dazzling take on Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons:

In a wide-ranging essay that connects Kanye West to Beethoven, Michael Markham discusses the similarities between classical music and today’s popular genres:

Vivaldi’s generation reveled, without embarrassment, in instant emotional gratification. Its most popular form of music, Opera seria, was not like later Romantic opera. It did not present a deep unified story in the Wagnerian sense, and instead provided little more than a series of 40 or so fragmented emotional moments, each represented by a static aria that crystallized a single mood.

Baroque-era audiences treated the productions as live “best of” concerts, wandering in and out of the theater, choosing to listen only to the excerpts that touched the right mood for them that night. Baroque composers were trained to enhance such evocative mood-experiences even when writing instrumental concertos. The constant nervous pulse (that for much of the 20th century led to Baroque music being called “sewing machine” music) invigorates in the same way modern rock or hip-hop does; the cascading sequences and recurring fragments of melody produce a pop-like repetition that pulls the listener back again and again to the same emotional starting point. …

The form of the Vivaldian concerto is based on the idea of the reoccurring “hook.” It is similar in this way to the verse-chorus-verse-chorus progression of our own pop songs. [Composer Max] Richter’s own comments on his music reveal this connection to today’s composition: “I was pleased to discover that Vivaldi’s music is very modular. It’s pattern music.” So is Richter’s, as well as that of many of the most prominent composers of both “classical” and “pop” minimalism (not to mention trance, hip-hop, dance, house, etc.) of the last 20 years — from Brian Eno and Meredith Monk to Kanye West, Gotye, Nico Muhly, and John Luther Adams.

Alex Tabarrok is perplexed by the popularity of the purchasing plan:

The typical layaway plan requires a deposit of 10 to 15 percent of the price of the good, say a new TV. If the consumer pays the balance over the following 10 to 12 weeks (i.e., by Christmas) they can pick up the good. If the consumer doesn’t pay the balance, they get a refund of payments made less a service fee. Walmart and Kmart advertise their layaway plans heavily. I am shocked, however, that so-called consumer advocates also have good things to say about poor people lending big corporations money:

Consumer advocates say layaway is a great way to manage a major purchase and stick to a budget, allowing consumers to spread the cost of an item over a number of payments without running up a lot of costly debt. …“The fees, if any, are generally nominal and probably much lower than the interest you’d pay if you purchased those things with a credit card and didn’t pay off the bill for several months,” said Tod Marks, senior editor and shopping expert at Consumer Reports.

Stop the insanity! The relevant comparison is not to buying on credit but to saving. Instead of lending Walmart money, get yourself an old-fashioned piggy bank and avoid the cancellation fee and the hassle of going to the store to make the periodic payments.

Erik Loomis defends layaway with a real-world example:

Let’s imagine a situation for layaway. You are 11 years old. It’s July. Your family doesn’t have much money. Getting new school clothes is a big deal because you don’t get very many new clothes in a year and you want to wear them on the first day of school. Your parents are really worried about this. They want to buy you the new clothes. They also know that they will have a really hard time actually saving the money to purchase them all at once. So they put them on layaway at the Target or Walmart and make the payments, hoping to have them all paid off before school starts.

How would I come up with this scenario? Because I was that 10 or 11 year old and my parents used layaway to get me those new clothes I wanted. In fact, in the scenario I am recalling, they actually couldn’t make all the payments and I really wanted those clothes and somehow we talked the store into giving us some of the clothes up front and breaking up the layaway, which probably only worked because I was there and nearly hysterical that I would have to wear old clothes on the first day of school. In a so-called rational economic world, layaway might not make sense. In the real world that actually people live and operate in it makes a ton of sense, even if it is bad economics.

Meanwhile, Drum contends that “the economic case against layaway is thinner than it seems”:

Suppose you put a $300 item on layaway for four months. What’s the opportunity cost? Roughly speaking, it’s the interest you could have earned on that money, which for most of us is around 2 percent or less these days. That’s a grand total of one dollar over the course of four months. Frankly, if layaway really does provide a psychological prod to make the payments, it’s not a bad deal at all.