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Tom Outland Goes to Washington

On Willa Cather and the government shutdown.

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#Mark Chiusano

The Myth of Khaki Democracy

By Ian Buruma.

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Why liberals are wrong to support military coups.

The Right Stuff

By Joseph Nye.

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Youth Unemployment's Not the Problem

By Daniel Gros.

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Across Europe, youth unemployment stands at record levels. But, argues Daniel Gros, this is only a symptom of the continent's much wider economic malaise. To focus on it would be a mistake.

Reinventing the European Dream

By Anne-Marie Slaughter.

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If You Don't Publish, Others May Perish

By Iain Chalmers.

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Putin's Ironic Potential

By Lilia Shevtsova.

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Reading your fortune

By Juan Gabriel Vásquez / Tr. by Jeremy Osner.

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Juan Gabriel Vásquez reflects on the continued prevalence of sortes vergilianæ, a form of bibliomancy, or choosing a passage from a book at random in the belief that the verses one finds will describe one's fate.

Greece's Election and Its Aftermath

By Harris Mylonas and Akis Georgakellos.

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After Greece's elections, everything suddenly looks very different. But it remains unclear whether anything much will actually change.

Greece’s elections last Sunday are a historic low for the country’s two traditionally dominant parties, PASOK and Nea Demokratia (ND), which have ruled the country since the collapse of the Junta in 1974. Together they garnered only 32% of the vote. To put this result in perspective, one has to consider that their combined total was less than what ND alone received three years ago—when it was beaten into second place by PASOK! According to polling companies, the collapse of support for the two main parties accelerated in the last week leading to the election. This is why the final result—and especially the strong showing for the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), which ended up as Greece’s second strongest party with close to 17% of the vote—was hard to anticipate. (SYRIZA got a final boost once it proposed a “Government of the Left” and—given the popularity of its young leader—managed to position itself as a more modern left-wing party than the Greek Communist Party (KKE), whose vote stagnated compared to the 2009 elections.) Less unexpected was the electoral success of the Independent Hellenes (10.6%) on the right and the Golden Dawn on the far right (7%, a 2400% increase from its 2009 tally!). What all four of these parties have in common is their absolute rejection of the terms of Greece’s bailout. Other than that one single fact, their political platforms could not be farther apart. It is highly unlikely that they’ll be able to form a joint government. In fact, if one takes into account the latest statements by various party leaders, any coalition government now seems highly unlikely. ND and PASOK, with 108 and 41 seats respectively, aren’t strong enough to govern alone—even if they could reach an agreement on a common agenda. Given the anti-bailout stance of four out of the seven parties elected to parliament, the only remaining hope now is that the Democratic Left party (DIMAR) could join ND and PASOK. But as of now, DIMAR’s president, Fotis Kouvelis, shows no signs of being willing to cooperate with PASOK and ND. Nothing is decided yet, but the next few days will determine whether Greece will delay further elections and form a makeshift coalition government—a coalition government that may lend the country an appearance of stability for a few weeks, but is likely to be stillborn—or whether there will be new elections in June. Another thing to note is is that the current electoral law produces odd and hardly representative results. For instance, ND received 2 percentage points more than the Coalition of the Radical Left. But this resulted in the party gaining 56 more parliamentary seats. This difference is explained by a 50-seat bonus that the current electoral law gives the party with the most votes in order to ensure stable governments. Clearly, however, this law was created for an electoral landscape dominted by two large parties, and is now outmoded. It is also interesting to note that, because a party has to garner at least 3% of the vote to enter parliament in Greece, more than 19% of the electorate supported parties that did not ultimately make it into parliament. These include: Popular Orthodox Rally-LAOS, Democratic Alliance, DRASI (Action), Dimiourgia Xana (Recreate Greece), Social Agreement (Koinoniki Symfonia), and the Green Party (Oikologoi Prasinoi). So extreme is the fragmentation of Greece’s party system now that the parties that did not manage to enter parliament collectively received a higher percentage of the vote than the party with the most votes—a party that nevertheless received 108, as opposed to zero, seats in parliament! (The liberal parties who failed to enter parliament in this election—Democratic Alliance, DRASI, and Dimiourgia Xana—would be able to form a relatively strong center-right faction in parliament if they formed an alliance for future elections.) Many messages could be drawn from this mess. For one, Greeks turned against the two established parties in part because they are no longer able to uphold their end of the bargain in the traditional "patronage contract," which rewards their reliable supporters with favors from public coffers. For another, Greeks voted against austerity measures. And yet they voted—at least nominally—in favor of a European future. This may appear extremely contradictory, but for many voters and party leaders it is not. Time will tell if theirs—Europe: yes; Austerity: no—is a realistic aspiration. The paradoxical truth is that the result, while to a great extent a protest vote, was for many a vote of hope: hope for something different. In any case, we should not consider these results as solidified partisan identities on the part of the voters. According to pre-election polls, many voters decided their votes in the last days leading up to the election. On top of this, there are people who—especially after learning the results—had second thoughts about the parties they had ended up voting for. This is the most volatile the Greek party system has been since the early 1950s. The result of the next elections could look very different. Combining the Greek result with the friction in Franco-German relations that will likely result from Francois Hollande's electoral victory in France, it is little wonder that European leaders have so far remained largely silent about Greece’s elections. Before they react to the result, they want to see whether a stable government can be formed. For now, it looks unlikely that Greece will be able to form such a stable government. The outcome of the Greek elections therefore increases uncertainty about the Euro’s future. The markets will most likely react negatively and remain volatile until things clear out. Since the election everything looks different. But it remains to be seen whether anything much has actually changed. Harris Mylonas is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Akis Georgakellos is a Political Analyst/Strategy consultant and a directing partner at Stratego—a Greek company.

Has Russia Gone Back to Sleep?

By Georgy Satarov

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The widespread protests against electoral fraud and state malfeasance that spread throughout Russia nine months ago are largely over. However, Putin and his regime may be celebrating "stability" too early. Russian society has become a dry peat bog, waiting for a spark to ignite it.

Europe's Implementation Problem

By Alex Gourevitch and Chris Bickerton

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The unravelling of political support for Eurozone agreements is not just a product of a far right surge across Europe. Elite opinion lacks consensus on the modalities of austerity and the deficit-reduction assumptions of the EU’s fiscal compact, and national governments are finding it increasingly difficult to implement unpopular fiscal policies.

The Challenge of Islamic Finance

By Andrew Sheng, Ajit Singh

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With Britain now in talks to sell part of the government’s 82% stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland to Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth funds, the Islamic world’s growing financial clout is once again on display. That clout also poses a systemic challenge to the dominant way that finance is now practiced around the world.

Shame

by Juan Gabriel Vásquez/tr. Jeremy Osner

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"War is hell," said Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration: he said it following the killing of 16 civilians, among them children, by a deranged sergeant in the Afghan province of Kandahar. This massacre unleashed on the world a series of images that one cannot look at without being reminded of similar massacres from the Vietnam War -- for instance, My Lai.

Jeremy Lin and the Political Economy of Superstars

By Kenneth Rogoff

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High salaries for athletes and movie stars are easily accepted by the public. So why, if a financial trader or a corporate boss is paid a fortune, does the public suspect that he or she must be undeserving or, worse, a thief?

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The biggest news around Cambridge in recent weeks has been Jeremy Lin, the Harvard economics graduate who has shocked the National Basketball Association by rising overnight from “nowhere” to become a genuine star, leading a losing New York Knicks team to an unlikely string of victories.

Lin’s success is delicious, partly because it contradicts so many cultural prejudices about Asian-American athletes. Flabbergasted experts who overlooked Lin have been saying things like “he just didn’t look the part.” Lin’s obvious integrity and graciousness has won him fans outside the sport as well. The whole world has taken note, with Lin being featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated for two consecutive issues. The NBA, which has been trying to build brand recognition and interest in China, is thrilled.

I confess to being a huge Lin fan. Indeed, my teenage son has been idolizing Lin’s skills and work ethic ever since Lin starred on the Harvard team. But, as an economist observing the public’s seething anger over the “one percenters,” or individuals with exceptionally high incomes, I also see a different, overlooked facet of the story.

What amazes me is the public’s blasé acceptance of the salaries of sports stars, compared to its low regard for superstars in business and finance. Half of all NBA players’ annual salaries exceed $2 million, more than five times the threshold for the top 1% of household incomes in the United States. Because long-time superstars like Kobe Bryant earn upwards of $25 million a year, the average annual NBA salary is more than $5 million. Indeed, Lin’s salary, at $800,000, is the NBA’s “minimum wage” for a second-season player. Presumably, Lin will soon be earning much more, and fans will applaud.

Yet many of these same fans would almost surely argue that CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, whose median compensation is around $10 million, are ridiculously overpaid. If a star basketball player reacts a split-second faster than his competitors, no one has a problem with his earning more for every game than five factory workers do in a year. But if, say, a financial trader or a corporate executive is paid a fortune for being a shade faster than competitors, the public suspects that he or she is undeserving or, worse, a thief.

Economists have long studied the economics of superstars in fields where a company can lever enormously the decisions of a small number of individuals, making them valuable in a way that someone who can, say, chop down trees like the legendary Paul Bunyan, is not. But the political economy of what levels of income differences countries will tolerate remains uncharted territory.

Of course, there is a certain logic to the public’s disdain for superstar compensation outside of professional sports and entertainment. This is especially the case in some areas of finance that are essentially zero-sum games, in which one person’s gain is another’s loss. There are other areas, such as technology, in which someone like Apple’s late founder, Steve Jobs, arguably delivers real innovation and quality, rather than just employing lawyers and lobbyists to maintain a monopoly position.

As a basketball fan, I would not describe the sport as a zero-sum game, even though one team wins and one team loses. The best players have huge creative flair. But so do some “street ball” players who excel in slam-dunk theatrics; perhaps because they are not tall enough to compete, they make almost nothing.

Do fans tolerate outsize sports incomes because players are role models? Many certainly are, but not all high-paid sports celebrities are exemplary citizens. Michael Vick, a star quarterback in the US National Football League, served time in prison for running a vicious dog-fighting operation, and arrests of players on charges ranging from illegal possession of drugs and weapons to domestic battery have been a regular occurrence.

And, back on the field or court, serious infractions occur all the time. Think of Zinedine Zidane’s infamous head butt in the 2006 football World Cup. In the NBA itself, a star player, Ron Artest, was suspended for the remainder of the 2004 season after going into the stands and brawling with heckling fans during a game. (Artest has now changed his name to Metta World Peace, perhaps in response.)

Moreover, sports teams surely lobby governments as aggressively as any big business. Professional sport is a legislated monopoly in most countries, with top teams extracting free stadiums and other privileges from host cities. Indeed, Lin’s story, it should be remembered, grew out of a huge labor dispute between the NBA’s billionaire owners and its millionaire players over division of the league’s nearly $4 billion in annual revenues – more than many countries’ national income.

As the late University of Chicago economist Sherwin Rosen postulated, globalization and changing communication technologies have increasingly made the economics of superstars important in a variety of fields. That is certainly true in sports and entertainment, but it is also the case in business and finance.

I wish Lin a long and successful career as a superstar, though he will have already had a huge cultural impact even if his success proves meteoric. One can hope that, as Asian-Americans continue to break barriers in other arenas – they remain under-represented among corporate CEOs, for example – these rising superstars will be greeted with similar acclaim.

If the public is not happy about high superstar incomes, the obvious remedy is to improve the tax system, including for powerful sports-team owners, many of whom benefit from huge tax breaks in their day jobs. Who knows? With a more level playing field, superstars outside sports and entertainment might find themselves a bit better appreciated.

Kenneth Rogoff is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University

Weimar Europe?

By Harold James

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Germany’s position in Europe looks increasingly peculiar and vulnerable. In the chaos of German unification in 1990, when Germany’s neighbors were terrified of the new giant, then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised a European Germany, not a German Europe. Today, however, the terms of any European rescue effort are obviously set by Germany.

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There is widespread recognition that Europe needs substantial economic growth if it is to emerge from its debt woes. But German concerns about stability – founded on its catastrophic interwar experience – push in the opposite direction. As a consequence, Germany-bashing is now in fashion.

Germany’s critics make two points: the real European problem is the German current-account surplus, and Germans are perversely obsessed with their past.

The German current-account position is in fact a long-standing issue that predates the monetary union. By the 1960’s, Germany had emerged as the strongest and most dynamic European economy, owing to robust export performance. German current-account surpluses, driven primarily by positive trade balances, appeared briefly in the 1950’s, were corrected after a currency revaluation in 1961, and then re-emerged in surges in the late 1960’s, the late 1970’s, the late 1980’s, and again in the 2000’s.

If the resulting imbalances could not be financed and sustained, there was a need for adjustment. At regular intervals since the 1960’s, Germany’s European partners, notably France, faced the prospect of austerity and deflation in order to correct deficits. This alternative was unattractive to the French political elite, because it constrained growth and guaranteed electoral unpopularity.

The French (and the other Mediterranean countries) preferred German monetary and fiscal expansion, which would attenuate Germany’s strong export orientation. But this course was always unpopular with Germans, who, given the interwar legacy, worried about inflation and its implications.

German policymakers thought that the issue would disappear with the monetary union’s launch, on the grounds that no one in the United States worries about a Californian boom that produces the equivalent of current-account surpluses (if anyone bothered to measure them). Nobody tells Californians to relax and go to the beach when times are good.

The second criticism, repeatedly voiced by the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman, is that the supposed German history lesson is chronologically false. It was not the famous hyperinflation of the early 1920’s that destroyed Germany’s fragile Weimar Republic and gave rise to the Nazi dictatorship. Rather, democracy was killed a decade later by depression and deflation.

This contemporary criticism misses an important element of the German policy predicament of the early 1930’s. By the Great Depression, Germany was already trapped, owing to previous bad choices. It is precisely that lesson which is deeply engrained in German political consciousness.

Germans are right to notice the parallels between conditions in Europe today and those in the interwar period. The similarities consist in the implications of the choice of currency regime for political behavior and democratic legitimacy.

At the end of its hyperinflation, Germany locked itself into a currency regime, the international gold standard, which was deliberately designed to be so limiting that exit was impossible. The anticipated consequence was that the country would appear credible and become attractive to foreign capital.

As the strategy worked, capital inflows sparked both public-sector and private-sector booms. Governments at all levels funded politically attractive but expensive infrastructure projects.

But there was a downside. The boom’s vigor, coupled with prior experience of inflation, led to wage increases that were not matched by productivity gains. As a result, Weimar Germany lost competitiveness in the late 1920’s, in the same way that Southern Europe did in the 2000’s. In both cases, it was clear that the capital inflows could not continue forever, and weakening competiveness meant brought the end forward.

When the reversal came, Germany was trapped. As foreigners and Germans alike withdrew deposits, banks were driven into insolvency and forced to liquidate their assets at very fire-sale prices. The government had to prop up failed banks; but it could fund deficits only by borrowing from the banks. Given its commitment to the fixed exchange rate of the gold standard, that meant that it had to impose ever more unpopular austerity measures.

Given all of these constraints, there was no easy way out. The path immediately adopted in the wake of the 1931 banking crisis was to impose capital controls.

The crisis was a defeat for democracy. The democratic parties’ obvious response was to flee from political responsibility during the period of the greatest economic hardship. The Weimar Republic’s last fully parliamentary government had already collapsed in March 1930 under the political weight of an impossible fiscal dilemma. Spending cuts alienated the left; tax increases angered the right.

Democratic parties acquiesced in the use of the constitution’s emergency provisions to bypass parliament and enact legislation in the form of decrees. In this way, democracy was already substantially eroded before the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933.

Banking and budget problems, fiscal constraints, and the emergence of “non-political” technocratic governments: all are horribly familiar to Germans with a sense of the past. The negative lesson of the interwar experience – that piling up more fiscal liabilities does not solve the problem – is already apparent in today’s Europe. But there is a positive lesson to be drawn as well: the possibility of an international order that supports rather than undermines democratic regimes at the moment when they take unpopular measures.

That was the lesson drawn from Weimar by Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first post-war Chancellor, and a man who – as mayor of one of Germany’s high-spending cities in the 1920’s – had seen the German catastrophe up close. Now, as then, Europe – a community of shared values – is needed to maintain democracy in nation-states threatened by economic breakdown.

Harold James is Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University.

This article first appeared on our partner site, Project Syndicate.

Too Big to Jail

By Simon Johnson

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Breaking an oath to tell the truth is perjury, and lying in official documents is both perjury and fraud. These are serious criminal offenses, but apparently not if you are at the heart of America’s financial system.

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Among the fundamental principles of any functioning justice system is the following: Don’t lie to a judge or falsify documents submitted to a court, or you will go to jail. Breaking an oath to tell the truth is perjury, and lying in official documents is both perjury and fraud. These are serious criminal offenses, but apparently not if you are at the heart of America’s financial system. On the contrary, key individuals there appear to be well compensated for their crimes.

As Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets has argued, the recent so-called “robo-signing” settlement – in which five large banks “settled” their legal liability for carrying out fraudulent foreclosures on mortgages – is a complete sell-out to the financial industry.

First, there was no serious criminal prosecution – meaning that no one will be charged with a felony, and no one will go to jail. In terms of affecting executives’ incentives, this is the only thing that matters.

Even the terminology used to frame the discussion is wrong. Kelleher, an attorney with extensive experience in private practice and the public sector, tells it like it is: “‘robo-signing’ is massive, systematic, fraudulent, criminal conduct.” Alternatively, as he points out, we could just call it “lying, cheating, and stealing.”

Second, the civil penalties in this settlement – a form of fine – are minuscule relative to the size of the companies involved. As Shahien Nasiripour, one of the best reporters on this issue, dryly put it: “None of the five lenders have said they expect to incur a material charge due to the settlement.” In other words, from a corporate perspective, the penalty is a trifling affair.

Third, such fines are, in any case, paid by the companies’ shareholders, not by their executives or board members (all of whom carry insurance). In the rare cases in which fines have been levied on individuals, either their insurance policies picked up most of the bill, or the penalties were trivial relative to the cash compensation that they received while committing their crimes – or both.

As if all of this weren’t bad enough, the banks reportedly will be able to use government money to write down the value of mortgages, which amounts to subsidizing them to pay their own meaningless fines.

The Obama administration and its allies have worked hard to sell its roughly $20 billion settlement with the banks as one that will have a meaningful impact on the housing market. But nothing could be further from the truth. As Kelleher points out, the United States has “more than 10 million homes under water” (the outstanding mortgage exceeds the house’s value). “Twenty billion dollars doesn’t make a dent in that: one million homes at $20,000 loan forgiveness is it.”

In fact, the Obama administration’s settlement with the mortgage lenders is consistent with its track record on all of its policies related to the financial sector, which has been abysmal. But it is also puzzling. Why would the administration continue to bend over backwards to be lenient towards top bankers under these circumstances?

I honestly do not believe that the administration’s stance reflects any form of corruption – payments made to individuals or even to political campaigns. And, in this case, it does not even appear to reflect the lobbying power of big financial players. That power certainly explains why the Dodd-Frank financial reforms enacted in 2010 were not stronger, and why there is now so much opposition to effective implementation of that legislation (for example, there is currently a huge fight around the “Volcker rule,” which would limit proprietary trading by megabanks). But mortgage lenders’ criminal activities are another matter.

Indeed, at stake in the mortgage settlement are fundamental and systemic breaches of the rule of law – perjury and fraud on an economy-wide scale. The Justice Department has, without question, all of the power that it needs to prosecute these alleged crimes fully. And yet America’s top law-enforcement officials have consistently – and now completely – backed off.

The main motivation behind the administration’s indulgence of serious criminality evidently is fear of the consequences of taking tough action on individual bankers. And maybe officials are right to be afraid, given the massive size of the banks in question relative to the economy. In fact, those banks are bigger now than they were before the crisis, and, as James Kwak and I documented at length in our book 13 Bankers, they are much larger than they were 20 years ago.

Top bankers want to make a lot of money. They also want to stay out of prison. Political leaders can huff and puff as much as they want, but, without a credible threat of poverty and time behind bars, bankers have no reason to comply with the law. For them, it’s all about the trade – and you can be the sucker in public policy as easily as you can be the sucker in an individual loan agreement.

The message to bank executives today is simple: build your bank to be as big as possible – and then keep growing. If you manage to become big enough, you and your employees are not just too big to fail, but also too big to jail.

The Obama administration has just made everyone else the sucker.

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the IMF, a professor at MIT Sloan.

This post first appeared on our partner site, Project Syndicate.

Is the Web Closing?

By Esther Dyson

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Within the tech community, there is much angst about whether the Web is about to be “closed.” However, the Web’s openness or closure is not a matter to be settled once and for all, but rather a fluctuating situation

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Within the tech community, there is much angst about whether the Web is about to be “closed.” Will it be controlled by companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google, or will it remain “open” to all? Will individuals be able to reach any content they choose? Will developers be able to serve users on any platform?

These questions are not new. Fifteen years ago, in the United States at least, it was America Online (now AOL) that was closing the Internet. Millions of people were relying on it for Internet service and content. Today, AOL’s purported control of the Internet looks like a joke, but it was considered a real threat at the time.

The threats nowadays come from both new companies and new models. (More about governments some other time!) Facebook is getting a lot of press, owing to its omnipresence and its pending stock offering. Increasingly, many people go online to use Facebook and little else, while Facebook encourages people to stay on Facebook to play games on Zynga, shop through Facebook commerce pages, and so on. Will Facebook control who gets to talk to us?

Likewise, Apple not only sells hardware; it controls, through its AppStore, what applications we can use on our iPads and iPhones. Amazon determines which books we read. Google, for its part, is filtering our search results – both by focusing our attention on what also interests our friends, and by excluding Twitter and Facebook results from what we see (mostly because Google and Facebook/Twitter cannot agree on whether Google should pay them or they should pay Google).

Beyond these big players, smaller startups are increasingly focusing on apps – applications that capture a user and keep him or her safe from the open Web. These apps are typically cleared and registered by big players. For many people, Apple’s App Store is a benefit, because it ensures (for the most part) the quality and security of the apps. Various app stores perform the same function for Android phones, but with fewer restrictions and less security.

In short, you can choose from along a spectrum, with more security at one end and more freedom at the other. The Web’s openness or closure is not a matter to be settled once and for all, but rather a fluctuating situation (even if the Web takes on some other name). CompuServe and FTP (file transfer protocol, remember that?) were not the end of Internet history. The same is true of the World Wide Web. Nor will Google or Facebook and apps be the last word of the digital age.

The great thing about Internet companies is that they, unlike governments, can be relatively easily deposed. They cannot outlaw competition, and, though they can engage in anti-competitive practices and filter content for their users, eventually consumers and startups fight back.

Consider the Web site Pinterest – “Organize and share things you love” – which has recently gone from startup to 11 million visitors a week. Even morerecently, it has attracted negative attention for secretly profiting from its users’ behavior and spamming their Facebook friends. Should we wait for users to notice, or should we call on some government to save them from their own blissful ignorance?

How can we distinguish between paternalism and our duty to protect people from companies with incomprehensible privacy statements? If people are happy with Facebook, why should we disturb them?

In a world where Facebook can go from dorm-room project to $100 billion IPO in seven years, it may seem careless to suggest that we can just wait for a backlash to come if one is necessary. But I think we can.

Of course, we can also be part of the backlash. In fact, paranoid bloggers and self-styled consumer advocates are all part of the workings of the broader market, which includes not just companies and activists, but also pundits and politicians, each with proposals to address perceived dangers.

Don’t get me wrong: collective action in the form of government interference will sometimes be necessary. The problem is that we are as likely to get bad measures – like the recently abandoned US attempt to enact anti-piracy laws that would have fostered wholesale Web site closures – as we are to get a freer Internet. (In general, antitrust enforcement is the best approach to ensuring an open market in a world where technology changes even faster than election cycles, though it, too, can be driven more by sentiment and fashion than by economics.)

We are now moving slowly from open data to a closed online world of Facebook and apps. Use of the Domain Name System (the address bar) will likely diminish, owing not only to apps, but also to a tragedy of the commons in which new Top-Level Domain names (.whatevers and .brands) confuse users and lead them to rely on the search box or links within apps instead.

At the same time, Facebook is responding (in its own way) to user and advertiser demands. Blogger Robert Scoble likes Facebook because it lets him manage and calculate his online popularity; I like it because I can limit comments (mostly) to people who are not totally crazy. And I can also write for Project Syndicate to reach (and hear from) a broader audience. None of this is all or nothing. Different individuals have different preferences; sometimes even the same individual has different preferences.

I don’t believe that we are actually facing a world of no choices; we have many, and it is up to us to select from them. I despise many people’s choices, but I prefer the world of the so-called long tail. By contrast, the short, fat front – where content is homogenized and individuals get either one central broadcast or something so tailored for them that they never learn anything new or encounter a disagreeable idea – is always more popular. But then, just when it seems no alternative is possible, some fearless entrepreneur comes along with something outrageous that, ten years later, dominates everything.

Esther Dyson is CEO of EDventure Holdings.

This article first appeared on our partner site, Project Syndicate.

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