Data is the New Love

via Doc Searles Weblog


Personal data, that is.

Because it’s good to give away – but only if you mean it.

And it’s bad to take it, even it seems to be there for the taking.

I bring this up because a quarter million pages (so far) on the Web say “data is the new oil.”

That’s because a massive personal data extraction industry has grown up around the simple fact that our data is there for the taking. Or so it seems. To them. And their apologists.

As a result, we’re at a stage of wanton data extraction that looks kind of like the oil industry did in 1920 or so:



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Ideas aren’t running out, but they are getting more expensive to find

a column by Nicholas Bloom, Chad Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb for VOX: CEPR's Policy Portal

The rate of productivity growth in advanced economies has been falling. Optimists hope for a fourth industrial revolution, while pessimists lament that most potential productivity growth has already occurred. This column argues that data on the research effort across all industries shows the costs of extracting ideas have increased sharply over time. This suggests that unless research inputs are continuously raised, economic growth will continue to slow in advanced nations.

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Neoliberalism by stealth? Exploring continuity and change within the UK social enterprise policy paradigm

an article by Alex Nicholls (University of Oxford, UK) and Simon Teasdale (Glasgow Caledonian University, UK) published in Policy & Politics Volume 45 Number 3 (July 2017)

Abstract

Social enterprise has been portrayed as challenging neoliberalism, and alternatively, as neoliberalism by stealth. Here we conceptualise social enterprise as a microparadigm nested within wider political and economic frameworks.

Our analysis of continuity and change over a period of political and economic crisis in England demonstrates considerable evidence of normative change in the ideas underpinning social enterprise policies. However, further analysis reveals that the (neoliberal) cognitive ideas underpinning the social enterprise paradigm remained intact.

This suggests that policy paradigms can accommodate normative differences within a shared cognitive framework, and hence, are more fluid, and have greater longevity, than previously recognised.

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Bringing political identity into discursive and ideational analysis: Welfare reform in Britain and the United States

an article by Fiona Ross (University of Bristol, UK and Lone Star College, Montgomery, Texas) published in British Politics Volume 8 issue 1 (April 2012)

Abstract

Over the past decade political science has benefited from a blossoming of research on ideas, discourse and constructivism.

These constructs and theories have greatly enriched our understanding of political processes, structures and cases but they have yet to elaborate a meaningful understanding of the actor despite promising to infuse institutionalism with a source of agency.

This article explores the impact of political identity, a concept that is intimately linked with the core epistemology of the constructivist research agenda, through the lens of welfare reform in two cases where the strength of identity politics differs, Britain and the United States. The concept of identity relates to who is constructing ideas and discourse and it invites ideational and discursive analyses to take actors seriously, beyond their generic role as thinkers and speakers.

Among voters, the capacity to construct an imperative for reform is not shared equally between actors. Actors who are identified with the extant path are more able to construct the imperative for departing from that path. Among elites at the institutional level, identity politics are tribal and legislators have clear incentives to lower resistance to their own chieftains.

The article argues that New Labour enjoyed enhanced success in constructing an imperative for reform and in legislating dramatic change in part because of its political identity. Much weaker but still identifiable effects are observed in the United States.

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