Someone recommended the book, “Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction,” by Derek Thompson. It had a lot of good things, many of which might be familiar with the readers of this blog but with some unexpected stuff too.
Here though, I want to mention a couple of things in the book that I disagreed with.
On page 265, Thompson writes:
Seems like a fair thumbnail description. But why call it an “unintentional” manslaughter? Many of the online advertising ventures were directly competing with newspapers, no? They knew what they were doing. This is not to say they were evil—business is business—but “unintentional” doesn’t seem quite right. This struck me because it reminded me of the “unintended consequences” formulation, which I think is overused, often applied to consequences that were actually intended. The idea of unintended consequences is just so appealing that it can be applied indiscriminately.
The other is on page 261, where Thomson writes that religion is an area where “researchers found no evidence of social desirability bias.” This in the context of a discussion of errors in opinion surveys.
But I’m pretty sure that Thompson’s completely wrong on this one. Religion is a famous example of social desirability bias in surveys: people say they attend church—this is something that’s socially desirable—at much higher rates than they actually do. And researchers have studied this! See here, for example. I could see how Thompson wouldn’t have necessarily heard of this research; what surprised me is that he made such a strong statement that there was no bias. I wonder what he was thinking?
I think the answer is that Craigslist had no intention to kill newspapers, although they had the intention to kill classified advertising. For all I know, Craig Newmark really liked newspapers and hoped they could find a different business model. That just wasn’t his job.
Hypothetical people who actually wanted to kill newspapers might start by trying to kill the classified ads as well, but I don’t think that was Newmark’s goal. Unintended consequences might be better phrased as collateral damage.
I think Andrew’s interpretation makes more sense. If I plan to extract all the oxygen from an occupied room, perhaps I don’t “intend” to kill the people inside, but it’s such an obvious outcome that it seems absurd to call the deaths an unintended consequence. Similarly, if I take away a major revenue source of newspapers…
Yeah… but again, I think calling it “collateral damage” is a better characterization, assuming I had some independent reason to remove the air from the room. In your example, I could avert the collateral damage at presumably little cost to me. When all you have is an idea for online advertising, it’s unclear what you’re going to do to help newspapers.
I’d disagree with both characterizations. At the time Craig’s List was started no one knew it would be successful at all, much less destroy the newspaper business. They expanded in response to their initial success.
People always look back at highly successful businesses and claim their success was inevitable at the time they were founded, but usually just the opposite is true. Many highly successful businesses were deemed bad ideas and unlikely to succeed at the time they emerged (from McD’s to Amazon!). If McClatchy thought an international on-line selling forum like CL was bound to succeed, surely they would have launched a competitor?
But the claim that the web undermined newspapers is suspect just by itself. AFAIK the news industry in the 1990s was a warren of protectionist regulations designed to prevent TV from killing newspapers and with the secondary idea of protecting the profit of local news barons. The web delivered the final blow, in part because it’s a better way to get news, but mostly because it undermined the regulatory structure that was preventing the collapse of paper news. I’ll guess that one reason classified adds were so important to newspapers is that by 1995 most of the higher paying adds had long abandoned newspaper for TV.
BTW, in the 1990s there were lots of papers that published only classified adds available for free that were already cutting into the big papers’ profits. Here there was one paper publishing only classified adds for cars and it usually had photos with the adds. There were several others – oh yeah! The Little Nickel! – publishing general local classifieds. CL killed these too, but now there are local CL competitors as well.
Chipmunk:
These are interesting points. Still, if companies in industry A do something to directly compete with companies in industry B, and then industry B declines, then it doesn’t seem quite right for this to be called an “unintentional” thing. In any case I don’t think that Newmark etc. have some sort of moral responsibility for problems with our current news environment.
Andrew said:
“if companies in industry A do something to directly compete with companies in industry B, and then industry B declines, then it doesn’t seem quite right for this to be called an “unintentional” thing. ”
:) In one sense I agree – i mean it seems irrefutable at first glance – but i’m having a hard time with the idea that one industry is intending to force a decline in another. I’d say they’re competing for a share of a given market. They don’t know how big the market is, and growing industries with fat margins attract the most competition.
Andrew:
The more I think about it the more I think that the constraint you provide, “industry A do something to directly compete with companies in industry B”, is probably not as common as people might think. Nike competes with other shoe makers, but when it moved in to “sports casual” fashion it created a whole new category. In one sense it’s competing with Hilfiger or whatever, but in another sense it’s brining new customers into the fashion market.
At least in English, people will often say an agent did X “intentionally” when it is a known side effect, but may also say that they did not “intend” to X. Furthermore, the first seems to be influenced by normative judgements — sometimes called the “Knobe effect” https://www.jstor.org/stable/3329308.
“Joshua Knobe famously conducted several case studies in which he confronted survey subjects with a chairman who decides to start a new program in order to increase profits and by doing so brings about certain foreseen side effects. Depending on what the side effect is in the respective case, either harming or helping the environment, people gave asymmetric answers to the question as to whether or not the chairman brought about the side effect intentionally.”
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137409805_6
Reminds me. Back in 1972 or 1973, I thought I’d learn some economics, so I took MIT’s economics department’s introductory course. The problems were bogus made up sillinesses, but that wasn’t what bothered me: the “correct” answers pretty much always had horribly socially undesirable side effects (that were blithely ignored by the TAs; the point was to crunch the numbers, not to be a moral human being) that I dropped the course in disgust midway through. (Later in life, I started reading the “saltwater” economists, and found them a far more reasonable bunch than the twats who were writing text problems in the 1970s…)
MIT is a saltwater university, closer to the ocean than any Great Lake.
“Saltwater economists are associated with economists from the Universities on the east and west coast of the US. In particular universities such as Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Pennsylvania Columbia and Yale.”
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/1762/economics/saltwater-vs-freshwater-economics/
No, MIT is a freshwater university. It’s on the Charles. I’ve sailed Mercuries (Boston’s Community Boating’s boat), Tech Dingies, Finns, Force 5s, Lasers, 505s, windsurfers, Hobiecats, and iceboats thereon, and except for the iceboats, I can assure you, the Charles is (despite the polution) technically “fresh” water…
(Also, Boston has higher average and max wind velocities than Chicago.)
And the inane intro to economics taught in the early 70’s was before anyone noticed the fresh/salt distinction. Or at least before the twats teaching it noticed.
David:
Please avoid offensive slurs. Thank you.
David wrote: “MIT is a freshwater university.”
That was not always the case. MIT used to be in Boston, indisputably a saltwater city, and moved to Cambridge in 1916. Moreover, the Charles was a saltwater estuary until 1910. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_River_Dam. If the dam or locks fail, the Charles will be tidal and saline again.
Bob76
its unintentional because there was no expectation that digital news and paid news cannot co-exist in a new equilibrium. Its not a-priori obvious that this was inevitable. it was only later when digital was better than paid newspapers in all senses (absolute quality upgrade), when it became inevitable.
Also, it was not obvious what the final equilibrium between “ad funded” and “subscription funded” online would be. The new media organizations with a tight focus and less than ten full-time equivalent employees do tend to rely on subscriptions through patreon, substack, and other web services. But its not obvious that there will be room in the future for organizations the size of a medium-sized city newspaper in the 1990s which sell information to an audience not audiences and personally-identifying information to advertisers. Those small online-first organizations are probably the future of real news in 2030, while big organizations will publish punditry and clickbait about national politics (hashtag slatePitch).
A different take: the unintentional consequence was normalizing *free* (to readers) news, not killing papers. Even online news sources which give people the option to pay have a hard time getting readers to subscribe as paying customers, ergo why news sites are filled to the brim with ads. The poor reader experience is worth it because readers largely don’t think they should have to pay.
This is pretty much true across the spectrum of online “free” services, where the offline version was paid for mostly by the user and the online version is *expected* to be offered free. Email versus a P.O. box, for instance, or search engines versus reference books. Even our web browsers, which we spend a lot of time on, are expected to be free despite the hundreds of hours of human effort that is poured into them.
I think it’s fair to argue that this mindset, where “free” is the expected price, was unexpected. While intending to supplant existing offline services, I don’t think most businesses expected to use ads as their primary bread-and-butter. Even today, I don’t think most (there are definitely exceptions) really prefer ad revenue over direct user revenue. But that’s merely conjecture (and possibly wishful thinking).
> The other is on page 261, where Thomson writes that religion is an area where “researchers found no evidence of social desirability bias.” This in the context of a discussion of errors in opinion surveys.
Is it possible that Thomson was talking about people’s claims of their religious beliefs (as opposed to their practices). There is a difference between saying you go to church when you don’t and saying you follow Islam when you actually follow Christianity.
The difference between the two is that the church example is a case where your behavior is in conflict with your beliefs (so you might feel a psychological urge to lie about your behavior).
Ethan –
> Is it possible that Thomson was talking about people’s claims of their religious beliefs (as opposed to their practices).
Maybe – but with that framing also, I think there’s likely a social desirability bias. As examples, (certainly shortly after 9/11) Americans might not want to say they hold Muslim beliefs, I’d guess a lot of American atheists hesitate to state publicly they don’t believe in God, people might be reluctant to acknowledge belief in religions that could be considered “out there” or wacky (scientology?).
Andrew –
As for the “intention” aspect – seems like an unresolveable semantic argument.
I’m in the camp with those who think the connotation of “intention” necessitates a fairly high bar of evidence. For me, saying someone “intends” something requires a kind of knowledge that’s pretty hard to acquire (knowledge of their mental or psychological interior workings.). But of course, people often ascribe “intent” without such knowledge.
So in the end, I can understand why Derek would day the deaths of newspapers wasn’t intended and why you would think that doesn’t add up.
As for this:
> The idea of unintended consequences is just so appealing that it can be applied indiscriminately.
I have a slightly different angle on that also. I agree that “unintended consequences” is over-used, because it’s often based on a kind bias towards binary thinking. Basically, all actions have unintended consequences. People apply that rule selectively. For example, someone might say that there are unintended consequences from wearing seatbelts. I would guess that’s true. But I think that framing is of limited value of you don’t evaluate the “unintended consequences” of NOT wearing seatbelts. But a hard core libertarian might use “unintended consequences” of wearing seatbelts to argue against seatbelt laws, without including the full context.
I see that kind of leveraging unintended consequences a ton. Basically, people use “unintended consequences” as a rhetorical tool, a lot, in a way that I think loses real meaning.
By the late 1970s, newspaper publishers were well aware of the threat that computer-based classified advertising posed to their essential classified-advertising revenue.
In 1980, the House Commerce Committee was considering legislation on the structure of the telecommunications industry. The newspaper industry fought hard to prohibit AT&T from offering electronic yellow pages. The thought of yellow pages sections for used cars, apartment rentals, etc. gave them great concern.
Later, in the AT&T divestiture process, Judge Greene imposed a similar constraint on the divested regional operating companies.
I believe that the account in Temin/Galabos “The Fall of the Bell System” is quite good. It’s been many years since I looked at it.
Craigslist started in 1996, so the newspaper industry’s lobbying may have delayed electronic classified ads by a decade or so.
Chuck