economics Archives - Page 19 of 24

Search and Research

It has been a long time since I wrote something about handling school work and such. I’ve been working on a couple of articles for some external parties and doing quite a lot of research and writing. The experience can be frustrating and tiring as I plow through loads of data, informative material and readings and then get lost in bits of thoughts here and there, never settling down to write. Such is research, you ask a few simple questions that you expect could be answered with a sentence or two but end up having loads of related answers and information that leads you to the fact that answers you’re looking for is way more complex. Then you realise you have got to put together evidence for each of your claims and explanations. People were asking me how I manage all that stuff, I told them that you’ve got to work out a plan somehow.

So in this article, I’d be discussing my method of planning writing and research. It’s by no means a definitive answer to managing your research or school projects but it might be an option you’d like to choose. I’m writing very generally about the kind of information research that leads to writing a paper/article; the sort that doesn’t require you to don on a lab coat and hold up test-tubes.

I recommend that before you start using Google, lay out some fundamental questions your paper/article would answer or specific information it will provide. It can be as general as an overview to a topic, or as specific as the number of petrol kiosk in a particular town. After listing them out, mark out the more specific questions and then hunt for the data first. These are usually the data sets you are going to use to introduce a particular claim or to support your theories. If there’s no such data available then you can find other proxy indicators or try and switch the type of evidence. It is important that you start off checking for the availability of the data you need or whatever you’re going to write would be groundless anyways.

After gathering the data you need, hunt for general articles on the topic that you are working on. These are the articles that refer to other more specific sources for information, or sites like Answers.com and Wikipedia. They serve as a directory for the topic and also to alert you or anything about the issue/topic that you might have overlooked. Often, these can also be blog entries that link up articles of related topic, much like the ones on ERPZ. When you’re clear you have a general idea of the topic and know briefly the issues involved, start planning your writing, listing the arguments, the progression of arguments and the sequence you present information to make your case. Often, some information you will need to provide are things you are not necessarily aware of, perhaps the revenue of a particular firm, the market share in an industry, or the response of a CEO to a recent affair. These are the stuff you didn’t initially set out to include but subsequently find rather significant.

Armed with the plan, start searching specifically for the information you need and formulate/sharpen your arguments according to these information. Unknowingly, you have actually slashed down the amount of content that you’ve read. By using general articles as signposts for your planning, you have drawn up the parameters of your research, something difficult when you’ve not read up anything or done any research. This explains the preliminary research into key and essential data you need as well as the general articles to get you started. The rest of your writing would build around these anchors that you’ve found in the beginning.

Then, follow through your plan as you write. This works for any volume of research, those that takes days to weeks and possibly months. For the ones where data sets have to be built from scratch either through ripping apart official statistics or carrying out your own surveys, the process would be placed between preliminary research and the ultimate planning. So happy searching and re-searching!

Printing Stuff

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Imagine you need a square meter of light, perhaps for a single ’tile’ on the ceiling that emits lights at your building. You’d probably get contractors to make a box with circuits inside that connects to a couple of fluorescent tubes (or if you’re quite rich, a couple of LEDs) and then cover the thing with a translucent white piece of acrylic. The entire structure is bulky and probably quite energy consuming. Now, scientists have found a way to make a ‘sheet’ of LED that would allow you to make that ‘lighted tile’ much more easily and is also much more compact. Essentially, the technology allows you to print a circuit that is wired in a way that acts as a diode, and one that emits light.

And since we’re at the issue of printing stuff; we mentioned previously about industrial prototyping machines that churns out 3D structures/models. I was quite intrigued by the idea of being able to print out a peg for your clothes or even design a shoe that fits you perfectly. But perhaps even more amazing would be the ability to print out cells, tissues and even organs as reported by The Economist.

The article mentioned about growing organs from scratch and raised the example of bladders being grown from original cells of patients. Essentially the patients are donating organs to themselves; the same applies for the printing of organs. The idea is appealing because there’s nothing artificial about them beside the involvement of doctors in the process of growing the cells and putting them together – ultimately the organ is still organic and from the patients. Perhaps then, Iran’s model for kidney donation won’t be so appealing anymore.

Planned Obsolescence

If you watched The Story of Stuff, which I introduced to this site several weeks back, it introduces several ideas that are perhaps unfamiliar to most laymen or locals for the matter. One such idea is planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence can be defined as “the process of a product becoming obsolete and/or non-functional after a certain period or amount of use in a way that is planned or designed by the manufacturer”. In other words, when product engineers design your product, they purposely design it such that it will physically or psychologically become obsolete (i.e. useless) after a while.

This sounds like a very disturbing idea, but it makes sense to the producer of the good for the consumer to keep purchasing “updated and improved” goods from them as their old ones break down. Planned obsolescence may even be described as an art; it would take much ingenuity, in fact, to design a product such that it does not break down too obviously as a result of inferior quality but consumers still want to buy this product and its future “upgrades”.

If you wonder how planned obsolescence affects us, this article from The Daily Green is useful in highlighting some occurrences of planned obsolescence in products we use in our daily lives. So have you unintentionally succumbed to this phenomena?

Biz Connect

Just recently, The Economist was tabulating the impacts of social networks and featured significant discussion on their impact on the business. The Big Money has a list of top 50 brand names (they call them ‘companies’) that has been doing well on Facebook as a social media vehicle for their brands. It appears that Facebook have become some sort of brand management tool that is carefully balanced with fans/consumer followings and interactions. As applications proliferate on these social networking platforms, there is a risk that all these commercial stuff are crowding out the actual social messages that are being sent over it. While

Google recently produced Buzz as I’ve highlighted previously, and The Economist thinks that it’ll hardly do much to dent the influence of Facebook and Twitter.

Diversity & Sophistication

Economics have been a subject troubled with the idea of scarcity and thinking about means of distributing resources to produce what we call ‘wealth’. Scarcity is a clear-cut notion and ‘abundance’ represents the other end of the spectrum. The problem is that we are so familiar with scarcity we cannot be quite sure what really represents abundance (infinite, in short run or long run?) and thus, we actually have a problem quantifying wealth. What constitutes richness? Money? Gold? Having the most expensive resources? Having in abundance the most useful resource? Having the most diverse resources? Having human capital?

We’ve seen that most of the rich, developed world appears to be the same, with the similar institutions, rule of law and informal market rules; most of them produce certain complex niche products while importing a variety of inputs as well as many other consumer products. On the other hand, developing economies appears more diverse. This shows that the end state of riches can probably be attained through different pathways. The Economists’ latest Economic Focus discuss how recent research shows that sophistication in the economy signals at the potential of an economy.

The Product Space map that the researchers came up with shows that an economy producing at a more centrally located product zone where it is easy to diversify into many other products would fare better than one in an isolated region. However, the isolated products often yield greater profits because they are probably rarer and so competition amongst economies leads to evolutionary forces pushing certain economies into these corners of product space possibly at the expense of potential. In any case, versatility is treasured and flexibility in production will aid economic growth.

Automated Eyes

I stumbled upon Tineye, a ‘reverse image search engine’. It basically allows you to upload an image and then perform a search for pictures that are similar to the image. This is the beginning of answering a question my friend have posted me a couple of years back when he asked if the Internet can help us find out the name of a person from a photo of him/her. Alternatively, if you have a picture of a place, you might want to upload the image to search for where exactly it is. Alas, Tineye is not yet capable of all that, to quote from the Wiki article:

A user uploads an image to the Web application search engine or provides a URL for an image (or for a page containing the image). The search engine will look up other usage of the image in the internet including their time of appearance and including modified images based upon that image. Tineye does not recognise objects or persons in an image, it recognises the entire image, and some altered versions of that image. This includes differently sized versions of the image.

The search engine is provided by Idée, Inc., a Canadian firm that also produces other image-matching technology products, like PixID. A demonstration of the power of this product is shown in this video that follows:

It purportedly helps client tracks usage of their photographs or images online and print publications to manage image license and also to ‘uncover unauthorized image usage’, and it kind of reminds me how it makes patent trolls’ job easier, reflecting a worsened state of gridlock. In other words, while the software may help to raise the opportunity for transactions and thus contribute value to creators, it might potentially discourage mashups in the area of graphic designs. Of course, it has a potential for good as well; scanning through a film can help the production crew find out whether they have obtained permission for all the images or clips used and would thus know what to filter out if they are unable to identify the owners.

The potential of such technology always works both ways and eventually it will be up to Economics to resolve the issues.

Putting a price on nature

For something that combines thoroughly both concepts of economics and the environment. A question that occasionally pops up when we ask about how we can internalise the external costs and benefits of nature, how we can monetise and valuate what is deemed free or priceless and how can we account for environmental protection and conservation in our equations of governance and environmental management.

The trigger for these questions came about when I read The Economist’s Green.view column online and saw an article about “price fixing”: not so much price fixing in terms of what we learn in Economics about monopolistic behaviour, but about how we can fix a pricetag on nature.

There’s plenty of debate with regard to putting a price on nature, as witnessed from the tremendous number of articles that can be found on this issue. The plausibility of this recommendation, with a detailed discussion on how it can work, has been discussed on Earthbeat on Australia’s Radio National, while in very recent history there has been a flurry of writings from Planet Green, The New York Times and BBC News. LiveScience has a more concrete and specific suggestion: a “market-driven approach to habitat preservation”.

Anyway, let me just try to summarise and highlight some of the pros and cons of putting a pricetag on nature. You should read the articles above for much more detailed discussions however.

Why would / should we put a price on nature?

1. Solve misallocation of resources: what we learn in economics in terms of the external costs of, say, water pollution on marine biodiversity, would thus be accounted for when firms do cost-benefit analysis because there’s a explicit price tag attached to it (The Economist uses a slightly different line of argument, I’m just phrasing what I understand in my own words)

2. Allows for developing and some especially-impoverished but nature-rich countries to tap into the money-spinning potential for the natural resources and at the same time enable economic development

3. On the Earthbeat link, it quotes a paper written in the Nature journal 4 years earlier on the value of “ecosystem services”, valued at US$33tr. Compared to the GDP of Earth at US$18tr, it seems like there is plenty of value in these “ecosystem services” waiting to be tapped, of which these services could be invaluable to humans (for example, clean air)

Why cant / shouldnt we put a price on nature?

1. Insult to the concept of the beauty of nature or reducing everything intangible in the environment to a dollar value or ignoring the greater benefits that ecosystems and nature provides. Like the sense of serenity and peace when one walks in a park: that cannot exactly be quantified in a monetary sense, and that may not be reflected even if a pricetag were to be placed on the park

2. How do we put a value to animals that might be of little utility but of much value to conservation and beauty? The article in The Economist compares the panda, which “humans are fond of”, with the dung bettle, which “provide the greatest utility”. How then do you price the two vis-a-vis each other?

The articles themselves cover much more details and examples. Again, this is some more food for thought for those who have always found themselves fighting a moral battle in their minds between economic development and environmental conservation.