Results tagged “economy” from Uncivil Society

Cell phones, China's commodities purchases or misleading new metrics? An interesting question raised by Paul Kedrosky using data from Wolfram Alpha. One commenter suggests Kiva, but no one really seems to buy that explanation.

Check out Alwyn Young's 2009 study, The African Growth Miracle for more data suggesting that we may need to move past the stock images of Western charitable colonialism.

Jeremiah's Vanishing New York has the story of the recent relocation of venerable Greenwich Village institution Ansonia Pharmacy, whose store window featured "a revolving display of mostly local art known as the Ansonia Pharmacy Windows."

The reason for the move was explained by this not-so-cryptic quote from Aristotle: "Everything that moves is moved by another." The reason, no doubt, is the substantial escalation of rent at the original location, a market phenomenon that many believe is causing Manhattan to lose its core identity. One proposal to stop things like this from happening is the adoption of commercial rent control for small businesses. Although Aristotle notes that politics is inherently an ethical enterprise, whether rent control is the ethical solution has been the subject of considerable debate.

Do do-gooders have a responsibility not to grab free content from commercial providers? Just a question that popped up after I read this comment on a post about circumventing the WSJ's firewall:

My father was laid off from the WSJ 4 months ago, we've moved from our modest 3 bedroom home to small 2 room place, and my parents are always fighting now.

Let businesses try to figure their model out without helping the general public steal from them. In the end, it hurts real people no matter how harmless you think your post may be.

A foundation-funded project featured on Information Aesthetics.

I really want to know more about this organization, which, among other things, in the mid-1940s placed comic book ads telling the story of brands & their public benefit. Below: the story of Revere Copper, responsible for America's independence from Britain and foreign imports.

Like I said, it was the mid-40s:

In the U.S., this past week brought the great KFC free grilled chicken coupon fiasco, as hours-long lines of people wanting a mere two pieces of free grilled chicken threatened to exhaust the company's chicken supply.

MultiCultClassics makes the connection.

It's the first day of this semester's venture initiation & entrepreneurship class, so I'm steeped in class prep. More about the class later, but what's striking me most now is how interesting it is to be teaching this class after a crash as opposed to before.   

So many of the texts seem archaic, even those just a year or two old. New economy! Ample credit! Ample investment capital! Good thing I've always taken a critical historical approach to bubblenomics. In fact, this year should be a bit more smooth, since we won't be fighting ubiquitous memes of unending unbounded wealth.

Not much else to say right now, since I'm off to hit the keyboard for other things. In the meantime, for your entertainment & instruction here are some robots from the future:

Prickly Situation at the Bronx Zoo from Gothamist on Vimeo.

A clever PSA in response to New York State budget cuts. More at WCS.org, via Gothamist.

Via See3's Michael Hoffman, it's more-or-less official: Wallstrip is dead.

Wallstrip, for those of you who never watched it, was a fun and informative video site dedicated to explaining the world of Wall Street. Good production values, sharp writing, engaging wit--Wallstrip was often a model of how educational video could work.

Making money, though, was not its strong suit.

And that's the thing. I've had social enterprise folks approach me about doing online video, but the pitch is typically accompanied by starry-eyed visions of making millions of dollars from productions that didn't have one-tenth of Wallstrip's infrastructure support. Funding operations through online educational media is a lot more difficult than a lot of folks think--and if the Wallstrip example isn't enough, just take a look at how many educational & charitable podcast series die after a few episodes.

Adam Ostrow's conclusion is spot-on:

The problem here is a simple economic one: though relatively inexpensive to produce and distribute (compared to network or cable TV), the costs of professionally produced online video are exceeding the revenue being generated by ads. And that’s a problem that’s not likely to be solved soon between the economic slowdown and the fact that the revenue that’s out there is flowing towards big media content being re-purposed for the Web. In fact, despite being 20x smaller in terms of video views, some estimates have Hulu catching up to YouTube in revenue this year.

Will we still see individuals making a living from compelling online video that spreads virally? Absolutely. But the economics of trying to re-create the network television experience on the Web are quickly falling apart, and unless either the audience suddenly surges or the ad market quickly pulls a 180, WallStrip’s demise could just be a sign of what’s to come.

Below: a couple of classic Wallstrip episodes:

Marrying for health care

Glengarry Glen Salesforce

Still using the break to gain some perspective. In the meantime, here are a few news items that stick out:

• This article has been making the rounds in design circles, and it really is a must-read for do-gooders of all stripes. I've been writing about the link between design and social benefit for a while, and it's a theme whose importance will only grow.
  
• Bruce Nussbaum on the shift from innovation to transformation. I have much more to say on that--in fact, I've already said a fair bit about it, if you read my articles carefully. What social enterprise folks should note: it's not just the talk about earned income & learning from hedge funds that face obsolescence.
• FilmLA has been in the news due to the decline of filming in Los Angeles. What I hadn't known: that a nonprofit coordinates movie, tv & ad shoots in the area.
  
• When can museums sell their works?
  
• Shaolin monks inspire controversy with their temple management franchise initiative.
  
• BBC announces the next Doctor today!

It's about time.

In my work I hear a lot about how for-profit/nonprofit cause marketing partnerships. The emphasis is usually on the positive--doing well by doing good, changing the way we do business, and so forth. What we don't see enough of are detailed reviews of how such projects actually work in practice, warts and all.

I especially want to emphasize those last three words. I've read plenty of rah-rah case studies where the critical analysis echoes the oh-so-clever answer every law student gives when a firm inquires as to one's greatest weakness: "I work too hard." But, like people, joint ventures are much more complex, and they'll never reach their potential if we pretend that even their weaknesses are above average.

Case in point: the breaking controversy of the Knight Foundation/MTV Young Creators' Award. The Knight Foundation's News Challenge program has produced a heap o' fantastic work--in fact, in the interests of full disclosure, I personally know and recommended one of the winning teams in a different (i.e., non-MTV-related) grant program.

However, the Knight/MTV partnership has generated a considerable amount of unhappiness among the young people who worked for it. Like Willy Loman, the correspondents in the Knight/MTV community journalist program worked unto exhaustion, long hours (allegedly) without pay--and what's worse, it's pay they were contractually obligated to receive. Since the experience seems to have spawned some disillusionment, attention must be paid.

The lesson now has become so relevant to the news we were covering - and our experience with MTV at the intersection of our nation’s financial crisis, the meltdown of traditional news media - and how the innocent idealism of youth that helped change a nation’s course - was exploited. What happened would wake us all up - on the Street Team, to the Real World.

EricaAmerica has the inside scoop; Gawker is looking for more.

Turn the kaleidoscope, and a local mall transforms from a commodified conformist culture-free zone into a nexus of community:

Both Birnbrey and Susan Wachter, professor with University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Real Estate Department, warn the social and economic impact of empty stores can be devastating.

"One of the biggest consequences [of store and mall closings] is the loss of a sense of community," Birnbrey said. "I am a big believer that malls are an essential part of Americana. A mall is a place where people gather and socialize."

Birnbey is an industry rep, but his point is nonetheless valid--malls are social spaces, and a well-designed mall builds on our tendency to connect. A number of malls, however, are designed as if their sole function is to line up a strip of stores, and my thoroughly uninformed guess would be that these are the most vulnerable.

Susan Wachter has done lots of interesting work on real estate, economics and society, such as this 2005 article on The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context.

If you want to know what it's like to chat with charity folks experiencing Madoff effects, their reaction is a lot like the picture above.

The woman sitting across from me at Starbucks is diligently studying her LSAT prep tests.

I remember those days well. I even taught LSAT prep for a company that went belly-up after a co-worker and I ferreted out that its founders were engaged in accounting fraud--or as it was known a few years later, financial innovation!

If you were unfortunate enough to hear me give a talk over the past couple years, chances are at some point you heard me predict that when--not if--the latest market bubble collapsed, it would have serious implications for the social enterprise movement. Two things in particular: a resurgence of resistance to nonprofit business and a tightening of viable low-margin ventures.

Ta daaaaaaah!

A couple news stories that came across my virtual transom today illustrate the problems:

The first one is truly sad, as a jobs & socialization program for the mentally challenged loses its employment contract with a local warehouse, which decided to cut costs by taking the work in-house. If a replacement isn't found, the rehabilitation services charity may have to shut down. When social enterprise rah-rah types exult in how the economic crisis will lead to a boom in socially responsible business, remember this, will you?

And from the Pottstown, PA Mercury (Berks County represent!), an op-ed on why nonprofit hospitals aren't really nonprofit. Its point: that nonprofits use high salaries and expensive projects as an accounting trick to net out expenses and revenues. Lawyer types will say the writer gets the law wrong, but that misses the article's potential effect, particularly on legislators--critiques like this are what gets the law changed in ways that make it harder for nonprofits to survive.

Factory, by Alexander Blok
11/24/1903
Translated from the Russian by me

In a neighboring building the windows are yellowed.
In the evening--in the evening
Ponderous bolts screech,
People approach the gates.

And the gates are locked shut
But on the wall--but on the wall
A motionless someone, someone in the dark
Counts people in silence.

I hear everything from my height:
With a brazen voice he commands
The crowd gathering beneath
To bend their worn out spines.

They enter and disperse,
They pile the sacks on their spines.
While in yellowed windows there's laughter,
About how they put one over on these poor souls.