Daily Archives: December 23, 2008

Abhijit Banerjee on Poverty in India

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From The Mint:

But the fact is we have not been able to reduce poverty at a faster rate. Does it show the poor quality of execution of various developmental schemes in India?
Almost surely. Many things that could have reduced poverty—better education, better health, better access to public distribution system—all those things have failed miserably. There is no surprise why poverty is not falling faster. Most of the reason why poverty is falling, is not because of public expenditure, but because (of) these people joining temporarily some urban workforce… that is how poverty is falling.

Long tail or not

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New research on music sales has proved that the concept of long tail does not work in that industry. Is it true for other industries too?

“I think people believed in a fat, fertile long tail because they wanted it to be true,” said Mr Bud. “The statistical theories used to justify that theory were intelligent and plausible. But they turned out to be wrong. The data tells a quite different story. For the first time, we know what the true demand for digital music looks like.”

Why Netbooks Are Greener Than Laptops

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Celeste LeCompte in GigaOm:

But perhaps netbooks’ greenest feature is their whole approach to personal computing. They don’t offer monster performance, but most of us don’t need monster performance. Netbooks are good enough for most of what I want to do most of the time, among them email, web browsing (including blogging), music, and some occasional online video. I suspect the same is true for many consumers, and because of their low price, they’re likely to become the computer of choice for consumers looking for nothing more than light-duty Internet machines.