 |
| http://insidefmm.com/2011/07/city-maps-location-app/ |
Books like Freakonomics tend to blur the lines, "allowing" the would-be unemployed to direct major policy shifts in education. There are only so many places for people to accurately predict the economy, and most of those are in government. You spend time working to find relationships and determine which relationships form trends. Then you make conjectures based on the direction of those trends. Kind of like Bryan Alexander does as my colleague.
One set of trends Bryan monitors is NITLE's Prediction Markets. These allow people to make "investments" in ideas. People "buy and sell" stock in candidates on the political talk shows. NITLE does the same thing with ideas and phenomena. Now it seems the process of "crowd sourcing" is coming back to the markets.
Arthur J. O'Connor has done some work on stock prices as they relate to Facebook status. Called "Sentiment Analysis," it has created a new research wing in the investment world.
As it turns out, there is a correlation between the number of Facebook "Likes" and stock price. 30 brands with the most "Likes" on Facebook. According to O'Connor 99.95% of stock price share could be explained in terms of Facebook fan count. Not that "Likes" make a difference, per se. However, the accompanying sentiment seems to have an effect. It was nice to hear the difference between "causes" and "could be explained by." There's a big difference there. The education world would do well to take note of this distinction.
Popular kids in high school tend to earn more than their counterparts. Up to 10% more, in fact--40 years later!
The point of the article was that academic focus alone is not enough for education to prove successful. I agree. That would be another blog, altogether.
Career success depends on many factors. I remember one friend of mine who was popular in high school. While failing in college, I saved his sorry academic butt. He went on to law school, got a job with his dad's practice back home, and seems to be doing well. He drove a much better car to the first class reunion than I did, anyway.
My car was a new Saturn. As I told people, "I put the down payment on credit card…and I 'financed' the rest." The fact was, I needed that new car because my ancient minivan threw a rod on the way up to the reunion.
Yelp! reviews have value, as well. Meanwhile, one of those sharp-witted tweets of yours? It's worth one tenth of one cent.
One of the great things about social media is it gives everyday people the chance to make a statement to others. Now, we see how this phenomenon is becoming monetized. Good for business? Bad for business? What about my privacy? [Note: if you're not paying for a service--like Facebook--you are the product, not the consumer.]
I don't care. What I see is vox populi affecting a stock market that tends to forget everyday people. However they get reminded of my existence is fine with me.
I love it when economists stick to economics!
No comments:
Post a Comment