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What is failure?
Robin Hanson writes:
I’ll take credit for creating some ideas the world has found useful, but I have completely failed both the market test and the academic test. That is, I can’t convince any business to let me join them to deliver my ideas at scale, and I can’t convince any top journal to publish my ideas.
Prediction markets are now known by all the people who read the top journals, so the final complaint may reflect an underrewarded Robin but not a failure of Robin. I also doubt if businesses will ever bite the bullet and adopt prediction markets on a large scale. The very reason we resort to a firm, rather than the market, is to build consensus and morale, not to forecast the truth. Prediction markets would tend to break down firms, but of course they still can flourish in Arrow-Hahn-Debreu space. Here is my previous post on why businesses don't leap on the bandwagon. The pointer is from Chris Masse.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on April 21, 2007 at 06:49 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
I absolutely agree with Hanson that "creativity" in business is hugely overrated. As he says in his BW article, everyone wants to be a Big Thinker. But I think he overlooks something when he writes
"What society needs is not more creativity or suggestions for change but better ways to encourage people to focus on important issues, identify the most promising ideas, and tell the right people about them. But our deification of creativity gets in the way."
What we also need is people who know how to implement new ideas, and are willing to do the hard work of attending to all the details and problems that the Great Visionary never thought of and can't be bothered with. One problem with the "deification of creativity" is that it provides an excuse for a lot of lazy, self-important individuals to proclaim themselves Innovators, and thereby avoid doing any work.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Apr 21, 2007 9:55:26 AM
I like cats.
Posted by: Kent at Apr 21, 2007 11:03:37 PM
I think I'm familiar with the real symptoms of failure, both personal and corporate. On a personal level, the loss of serotonin when you most need it to convince others would be an important one I think. Perhaps Robin needs a "kick" there to help get his ideas adopted.
And my coffee mug reminds me every day of a quotation attributed to Churchill:-
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."
Has Robin used a prediction market to predict whether prediction markets should be successful?
BTW, creativity is not over-rated, but frequently and generally overlooked. If it were not, the world would surely be a better place. When the world is perfect, I think we can start to argue there is a creativity surplus. Creativity in my book is actually doing stuff, not thinking it.
Posted by: knackeredhack at Apr 22, 2007 10:26:39 AM
Bernard has a good point, but we're missing a lot here.
First, Robin seems to be committing attribution error, which is an error that is especially easy when you try too hard to avoid confirmation bias. His idea was clearly good and correct, and maybe he should have marketed it a little better, but it looks like there's a certain failure to give Robin his due recognition. Of course, that may still be efficient, because society is still giving Robin enough resources to come up with a lot of good ideas. Would giving Robin more recognition/money increase his output of really great ideas?
The simple fact is that economics as a profession does not really value vision. You gain fame as an economist by solving a problem that other economists already see as important and cannot solve themselves. A visionary idea or observation does not meet these criteria. This is a severe limitation of economics as a profession.
At the end of the day, you'll do a much better job seeing the future (and shaping the future if you want to try that) by applying fairly basic economics to large scale technological trends and teasing out implications. Your ideas will be bigger and better (and will have more profit potential). My suggestion: when you have a big visionay idea that doesn't have the mathematical pyrotechnics to appeal to the technical priesthood in economics, work on getting into a more casual but widely read venue like the trade press and, if you can really pull if off, someplace like the Harvard Business Review.
Funny story: My good friend and co-author Peter Alexander was the first to predict that music would be distributed over the internet. He mentioned this in an article in the Journal of Cultural Economics in 1994. The editor (not Tyler!) actually tried to make him take that part out.
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