Author: Derek Thompson

There are a lot of reasons why obesity has taken off over the last 30 years, but one very obvious reason is that food — especially fat food — is so cheap:

Food is cheaper here than almost anywhere else. In 2007, only about 6.9
percent of U.S. consumer spending went for food at home; Germans spent
more (11.4 percent), as did Italians (14.5 percent) and Mexicans (24.2
percent). On the other hand, low food prices may contribute to
Americans’ obesity. In 2006, about 34 percent of U.S. adults were
judged obese, triple France’s rate (10.5 percent) and four times that
of Switzerland (7.7 percent)

But why is food so cheap in the United States?

As Bryan Walsh explains in this excellent TIME article, it starts with
corn. American corn production has tripled in the past 40 years, from 4
billion bu. in 1970 to 12 billion. Billions of dollars of subsidies
have injected steroids into corn production, and our farmers have
injected chemicals into our fields — “American farmers now produce an
astounding 153 bu. of corn per acre, up from 118 as recently as 1990.”
Money might be scarce, but cheap food is abundant. As a result, food
expenditures as a percentage of income have fallen by half in the last
half-century, and obesity rates have doubled.

Two graphs, just to drive the point home. The cheap food revolution
hasn’t just given low-income families cheaper options. It’s come at the
expense of healthier food. A dollar today buys 1,200 calories of potato
chips and 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit.
Walsh gets it right: “it simply costs too much to be thin.”

The
cheap food revolution has aided the fast food revolution. Countries
with fast food chains that piggy-backed on the corn boom have become
more efficient eaters. But we’re learning to be efficient in the wrong
ways. By cramming as many calories into a dollar and a minute as
possible, our evolutionary instinct to maximize our calorie intake is
suddenly working against us.

Esquire has somehow become the leader in cutting-edge print magazine technology. The magazine rings in anniversaries with twinkling electronic ink, invites readers to mix and match the faces of George Clooney, Justin Timberlake and Barack Obama, and now they’ve installed bar codes within articles for readers to scan with their smart phones and pull up additional information online. This is cool, I guess, for people with bar code-reading apps on their smartphones. But I think Esquire’s emphasis on magazine technology is smart for a subtler reason.

First, the new stuff:

In its March issue, Esquire will print Scanbuy codes in a spread on
“The Esquire Collection” — “the 30 items a man would need to get
through life,” said David Granger, editor in chief. Printed near each
item will be a small code that looks like a group of black and white
squares. Readers scan the code into an Internet-enabled phone, and the
code takes them to a mobile menu that provides Esquire’s styling advice
for the item and information on where to buy it.

I’m interested in this because it seems so backward. Esquire’s Web site isn’t very good. But instead of spending money on website technology, the magazine is spending money to bring web technology to the print magazine. Thing is, I think it’s a defensible strategy.

Last year the New York Times reported
that Hearst, the company that publishes Esquire, was faring much better
than expected in the recession despite having a limited web strategy.
I’d guess Hearst was faring much better than expected because
it has a limited web strategy. In the last 10 years, publishers have
given away their content for free online, thinking they could make up
the revenue with online ads. As a result, consumers today consider magazine
stories to be ad-supported commodities. But the production of a long
magazine story is anything but cost-free — it’s a long, expensive
process with wide travel and long hours. I think Hearst’s limited web
strategy has actually avoided the fate of other magazines, whose
superior websites have cannibalized readers by encouraging them to drop
subscriptions and read everything online. In a weird way, their inferior website have helped buttress their print magazines’ circulation. Esquire’s technology
revolution hasn’t been online. It’s been in print. Strange. But not as strange, perhaps, as assuming that “Everything is Free” was a workable model for magazines.

Bradford Plumer makes a really excellent point here about how prices and incentives and good energy policy don’t always align, and still won’t even if we pass cap and trade:

A renter might notice
that his windows are leaky and the refrigerator is old and
decrepit–and that all this waste is hell on the monthly electric
bill–but he’s not going to caulk the windows for a place he’ll move
out of in a few years. And the landlord, meanwhile, isn’t paying the
energy bill, so why should he buy a new fridge? No one’s behaving
irrationally here–it’s just that the incentives don’t align in favor
of efficiency. And a price on emissions wouldn’t necessarily fix this.
That’s why, in some cases, there’s a rationale for well-designed
regulations in addition to a carbon cap.

This pivots off an interblog discussion about whether there are lots of firms passing up profits by not adopting “pollution-abatement” policies, like the ones in the graph below.

Last year EnerNOC, an energy efficiency consulting company, located
$100,000 in energy savings for Morgan Stanley’s Times Square offices
(they were keeping the elevator machinery rooms as cool as the
corporate suite, and things like that). Morgan Stanley’s profit in the
first three quarters of 2009 was more than $100,000. To be specific, it
was $729 million more. So you can understand why spending time on an
energy efficiency policy was not a big concern for their
board. But that’s exactly why it’s likely that there are a lot of firms
like Morgan Stanley who are likely passing up abatement policies, even
if they save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It makes sense that adopting a national cap and trade policy would
raise national awareness of emissions, and that awareness might trickle
up to the folks who exercise control over their buildings’ energy use.
But Plumer’s exactly right that not everybody has a financial incentive
to care about how much energy they consume. For example, I live in an
apartment where heat is included in the rent, so nothing’s stopping me
from turning the thermostat to Tropical and watching TV in my
bathing suit all year.
The cost of heating being factored into my rent is a bit like an employer taking health care out of our
compensation. We don’t see the money being spent, so we don’t have the
same incentive to ration our use — of heat or health care.

Here’s Peggy Noonan’s latest column for the Wall Street Journal about Obama’s “catastrophic” first year. I guess I just don’t get it. Any of it. She writes:

The public in 2009 would have been happy to see a simple bill that
mandated insurance companies offer coverage without respect to previous
medical conditions. The administration could have had that–and the
victory of it–last winter.

Instead, they were greedy for glory.

What does that even mean?

I don’t understand the
claim that extending health care to 30 million Americans is an act of greed. Yet I see this trope everywhere — this “Health care reform is all about Obama” thing — from Fox News, where I expect it, to the Washington Post, where I’m learning to expect it.
There are plenty of defensible reasons to criticize this bill. You can
say it entrenches a broken system; you can say it fails to provide a
public option; you can say the CBO scores are counting mystical cuts to
Medicare that will be difficult to pass. But seriously: Obama is trying to provide health care to 30 million Americans, all for himself. Try harder.

Then there’s this paragraph:

What a blunder this thing has been, win or lose, what a
miscalculation on the part of the president. The administration
misjudged the mood and the moment. Mr. Obama ran, won, was sworn in and
began his work under the spirit of 2008–expansive, part dreamy and
part hubristic. But as soon as he was inaugurated ,the president ran
into the spirit of 2009–more dug in, more anxious, more
bottom-line–and didn’t notice. At the exact moment the public was
announcing it worried about jobs first and debt and deficits second,
the administration decided to devote its first year to health care,
which no one was talking about. The great recession changed everything,
but not right away.

Obama “didn’t notice” the recession? What movie is Peggy watching, and on what planet? If she didn’t like the $787 billion stimulus, or the government takeover of General Motors, or the three months when bank bailout figures were so colossal we forgot what a billion dollars meant any more,
that’s fine. Again, reasonable people can debate the administration’s
recession-fighting policies. But first let’s agree that there were a
lot of recession-fighting policies to debate!

After spending a trillion dollars on the economy, Obama turned to health care reform. That’s because he was overwhelmingly elected after running on health care reform, and in January Americans wanted him to follow through. Noonan’s last sentence is backward: The great recession changed things right away, but it didn’t change everything.

The Jay Leno Show is over. NBC couldn’t make good TV. So it tried to give up on making good TV. It couldn’t even do that well. So now it’s giving up on giving up on making good TV, which is better. But here’s what I find so ironic. When the show was introduced in September, I wrote this:

NBC has screwed its own reputation handily in the past few years. Knight Rider? Lipstick Jungle? My Own Worst Enemy? These were powerfully horrible shows, and perhaps creative teams responsible for one
hundred days of Kath & Kim do not deserve a second opportunity on
earth.

The Jay Leno Show premiered on September 14, 2009. NBC has decided to axe it after four months. Kath & Kim lasted five months. Knight Rider lasted six months. Lipstick Jungle lasted thirteen months. I guess the future of television is: Fail faster.

There’s a bit of a blogospheric brouhaha over this Jim Manzi essay in National Affairs, which said that European-style social democracy slows economic growth. Manzi wrote that the United States’ share of world production hasn’t changed since 1980, while Europe’s has decreased, and blames the difference on Europe’s social democratic agenda. TNR’s Jon Chait wrote a persuasive rebuttal, pointing out that GDP per capita growth is the better yardstick, and it grew almost as much in Europe as in the United States in the last 30 years. The difference was population growth. Europe’s population grew 7%, while America’s grew 25%.

I was reminded of this debate when
reading James Fallows’ wonderful new Atlantic cover story (subscribe!).
Fallows takes stock of the jeremaids about American decline. One worry
is that the United States won’t be the largest economy in the world in
a few decades because China is growing so quickly. But as Fallows
elegantly explains, there’s a difference between falling behind China
in the GDP list and really, truly “falling behind.”

Someday [China’s] economy will be larger than ours. Fine! A generation ago,
its people produced, on average, about one-sixteenth as much as
Americans did; now they produce about one‑sixth. That change is a huge
achievement for China–and a plus rather than a minus for everyone
else, because a business-minded China is more benign than a miserable
or rebellious one. When the Chinese produce one-quarter as much as
Americans per capita, as will happen barring catastrophe, their economy
will become the world’s largest. This will be good for them but will
not mean “falling behind” for us.

And yet the difference between keeping up and falling behind really is
a matter of people. Not just more people, but more of the right kind of
people. Part of maintaining America’s edge is attracting foreigners to
study and work and build companies in the United States.

“We scream about our problems, but as long as we have the
immigrants, and the universities, we’ll be fine,” James McGregor, an
American businessman and author who has lived in China for years, told
me. “I just wish we could put LoJacks on the foreign students to be
sure they stay.” While, indeed, the United States benefits most when
the best foreign students pursue their careers here, we come out ahead
even if they depart, since they take American contacts and styles of
thought with them. Shirley Tilghman, a research biologist who is now
the president of Princeton, made a similar point more circumspectly.
“U.S. higher education has essentially been our innovation engine,” she
told me. “I still do not see the overall model for higher education
anywhere else that is better than the model we have in the United
States, even with all its challenges at the moment.” Laura Tyson, an
economist who has been dean of the business schools at UC Berkeley and
the University of London, said, “It can’t be a coincidence that so many
innovative companies are located where they are”–in California,
Boston, and other university centers. “There is not another country’s
system that does as well–although others are trying aggressively to
catch up.”

Think about that first quote for a second: “As long as we have the
immigrants … we’ll be fine.” Politically, that might be a strange
thing to say. Elections are won and lost on the ability of candidates
to convince the public that they have undying faith in the inherent
talent of the American people. But national greatness is won and lost
on the ability of America to attract the world’s talent. One of the
well-documented tragedies of 9/11 is that it scared the Bush
administration into designing a Visa program that makes it absolute
hell for immigrants to stay and work in America. To bring this post
full circle, there are a lot of important debates to have about
designing an economic system that stokes entrepreneurialism and builds
adequate safety nets, but let’s begin where both sides agree. Manzi
wrote of “reconceptualizing immigration as recruiting.” That’s an idea
I can get behind.

This week I noted that obesity has passed cigarette use as our biggest national health threat. But there’s a silver lining. Obesity caught up so quickly because cigarette use has actually decreased by 20 percent in the last 15 years. Something about our anti-cigarette policy is working, I wrote. Still, this seems like overkill:

The recent fuss over “Avatar,” the James Cameron film in which the
latest in cinematic technology meets the oldest argument in the movies:
whether vice on screen encourages vice in real life.

In
“Avatar,” a character played by Sigourney Weaver smokes. Antitobacco
advocates say on-screen smoking — even by a character we’re supposed
to dislike, like Ms. Weaver’s — makes children pick up the habit. They
have criticized the movie as a threat to public health.

Even the stiff New York Times editorial page throws up its hands and emits an audible sigh.
I know, I know, the antitobacco activists have science behind their
kvetching. I also recognize that any good public relations campaign
requires a certain over-caffeinated peskiness. But still, did they see
this movie? (SPOILER ALERT.) Sigourney Weaver plays a caddy futuristic
biologist with all the worst lines in the movie, delivered with
remarkable woodenness. It’s one thing to complain about a film where a
modern-day mobster smokes between his super-cool brushes with the
law. That’s sort of enviable. But trust me folks: Sigourney Weaver’s cringe-inducing turn won’t
inspire anybody, and a little discretion won’t kill you.

Jay Leno is going back to late-night.

NBC is shutting down the primetime Jay Leno Show and moving their leading chin back to his old 11:30PM slot, TMZ reports. In September I said I wanted The Jay Leno Show to fail. Now it has. This is good news, for everybody.

Last fall, TIME called Jay Leno “the future of television.”
It wasn’t because he was particularly entertaining, or bold, or
revolutionary. He is really none of those things. But he was cheap. NBC was
striking out with all of its new (horrible) pilots — Knight Rider? Lipstick Jungle? My Own Worst Enemy? —  and so its executives basically gave up on storytelling. Running Jay five nights a week would cost
less than a single hour of primetime drama. It was a cynical move. Fortunately, it didn’t even last the winter.

Why did it fail? Well, advertising immediately fell off a cliff.
NBC’s 10 p.m. advertising rates were down as much as 70 percent by
November. Viewership in the precious 18-49 demographic at 10 p.m. fell 45%
in two months. News affiliates were in revolt because their audiences
and ad revenue piggy-back on NBC’s 10 p.m. audience. The fish was rotting
from the head.

This move is awfully embarrassing PR for NBC. The network originally
defended the Leno move because he would be recording new episodes all
summer 2010 against re-runs. It’s 20-degrees outside right now in the
dead of winter and Leno experiment is six feet under. But something
else lives. It’s called … Good television. NBC should think about making some of that.

There’s plenty of evidence that the job market will begin to turn a corner very soon. Here’s more:

More employers plan to increase college graduate hiring than decrease it for the first time in more than a year.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers‘
index for college hiring rose to 98.2, up from 87.2 in November. The
index, based on the organization of career counselors’ survey of 122
employers and released Tuesday, covers employer expectations for
January through March.

More good news. This graph from Calculated Risk of initial unemployment claims shows a sharp drop-off from the 2009 high.

CR
likes to point out that unemployment will peak when the four-week average
sneaks below 400,000. At the current rate — the number is around 450,000 and falling by 10,000 per week — that’s projected to happen
by March. Still most long-term estimates project that unemployment will remain over 9 percent well into next year.

Bankers like to compare their high salaries to professional athletes. This is because many of the people who’d like to make effigies of millionaire bankers also own jerseys of their favorite, even richer athletes. Watch out, cognitive dissonance! Don’t you people understand, Goldman Sachs tells us, we’re just like baseball players. If you don’t pay us, we’ll leave. James Kwak tries to debunk this line of argument.

He concludes that

yes, bankers are like athletes. Their individual contributions are
overrated relative to their supporting environments; they are overpaid;
they are paid based on where they randomly fall in the probability
distribution in a given year; and paying a lot for bankers is no
guarantee that your bank will be successful in the future. Team sports,
like banking, are an industry where the employees capture a large
proportion of the revenues. And one with negative externalities, like
upsurges in domestic violence around major sporting events. Neither one
should be a model for our economy.

I somehow agree with everything Kwak says, and am also weirdly
unconvinced by his argument. Bankers and athletes are paid a lot, and
possibly too much. But, so what? If Kwak is trying to suggest that pay
doesn’t dramatically effect
performance in the aggregate, he picked the wrong sport with baseball.
In 2008, five of the eight teams that made the playoffs were among the
top 10 in highest payroll. Two more in the top five — the Yankees and
Mets — both barely missed because of an untypically dismal start and
finish to the season, respectively. The Yankees make the playoffs just
about every year. So do the Red Sox and the Angels. Those are three of
the top six payrolls.

Kwak doesn’t refute the main point by the Goldman director: If you
don’t pay Goldman Sachs employees what they think they’re worth (or
what they can get from another bank), they will leave. That’s just an
indisputable fact.

Now we can have a debate about whether we
want
our current bankers to be incented to go into other jobs by limiting
their total compensation pool, which will cut their salary and send
more of them looking for jobs in other industries.
The let’s-make-banking-boring-again crowd might like this idea. Volker
might like this idea. Kwak might like this idea. I might like this idea.
You could do this with an industry-specific tax, which would seem kind
of draconian. Or you could try to shrink the compensation pool with
capital requirements and leverage ratios. But I guess I don’t understand the value of comparing and contrasting athlete and banker salaries and incentives.

I assumed that 3-D TV would remain an unfulfilled promise. Always “of the future” and never “of right now.” Like the Dippin’ Dots of living room technology. Apparently, I’m wrong.

Mitsubishi, Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, and JVC will all be showing off 3-D television products at the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show, which starts today. Sony grabbed the early headlines with three new sets that combine a 3D transmitter and special glasses to bring TV into the next dimension.

My interest in 3-D TV hits a speed bump when I hear about the glasses. It’s one thing to wear funny-looking specs in a dark theater where nobody can see you. It’s another to invite your buddies over for the football game and worry about having enough chips and dip and special goggles. But what if we could have 3-D TV without the glasses?

It’s almost here:

Philips’ WOWvx technology
uses image-processing software, plus display hardware that includes sheets of
tiny lenses atop LCD screens. The lenses project slightly different images to
viewers’ left and right eyes, which the brain translates into a perception of depth…

The multiple images allow viewers to walk around the viewing
area–a cone about 20 degrees wide–without disturbing the 3-D illusion.

There are still bugs with the technology. For example, images that aren’t coded for 3-D viewing still look messy, and it would be nice to have a set that’s backward compatible so you could watch both 2-D and 3-D images in high definition.

One thing I wonder about this technology. If you can design a TV set that projects slightly different images, could you somehow have a single television set tuned to two different channels? In other words (and maybe this would require the glasses, again) could I watch a football game without sound on my 3-D TV while my friend to the right watches Jersey Shore on the same set, with volume? Open question to techies out there…

This is a very reasonable economic forecast for 2010 from AEI’s John Makin (via Jon Chait’s great new blog.) Chait focuses on the part that says the stimulus boosted GDP by 4%, and wonders whether Republican senators will bother to read that part. Fair enough. I want to focus on the part about consumer demand, and why it’s not sustainable without more government stimulus.

When we reported that GDP growth between July and September was 3.5%
(it’s been revised down to 2.2%), I pointed out that families’
discretionary income actually
fell between July and September even as consumption on durable goods
skyrocketed. The difference was government stimulus, like the housing credit and Cash for Clunkers. Makin makes the same point:

During the three months ending in October, real consumer spending rose
at a 2.6 percent annual rate while real disposable income rose at a 0.6
percent annual rate. Whether spending can continue to grow
substantially in excess of income growth, and therefore draw down
savings, remains one of the major uncertainties overhanging the U.S.
economy as we move into 2010.

This provides a chicken-egg conundrum. Employers won’t grow the
compensation pie unless they see sustainable demand for their goods or
services. They won’t see sustainable demand for their goods and
services unless Americans keep spending money. Americans won’t keep
spending more money than they’re getting from employers. It seems to me
that the only way to complete the circle is to continue to rely heavily
on government stimulus, in the form of tax credits for employers to
hire or employees to spend.

If we’re going to see a robust recovery next year, the most likely
driver is still exports. The American consumer still needs crutches to
stand, but the Asian consumer is on a tear. The ’00s boom was fueled by
American demand, but in the recovery it’s America that will be leaning
on China and India to buy our stuff and bring us back to full
employment.

Saying you’re a deficit hawk is like saying you’re a patriot. Everybody claims to be one, but the definitions vary so wildly as to make the term utterly worthless. Catherine Rampell breaks down the internecine war among self-proclaimed hawks at the New York Times’ Economix blog. It’s a good piece, but I disagree ever-so-slightly with her take on why we can’t get a good conversation going about fixing structural problems with our debt.

She writes:

The biggest criticism I have right now of
Washington’s handling of fiscal policy: Yes, government officials can
do things that foster economic recovery this year. And they can do
things that will save the economy from a debt crisis 10 years from now.
But the options on the table for fixing the economy today are
relatively concrete (if sometimes controversial), whereas those for reducing the budget tomorrow are notoriously vague…

I think that’s true, but it’s not surprising. Obviously a bill that
makes its way to the president’s desk is more specific than
an idea for a bill that hasn’t been written. Moreover, there’s no
political gain in writing up a concrete, rational plan for budget
reduction. Fighting the deficit will require a painful combination of
tax increases and budget cuts. It will be a bitter pill. If you think
spending an extra $787 billion to fight a recession didn’t go over
well, try presenting a bill that raises taxes and reduces services in
the name of “shoring up our long-term finances.”

This reluctance to commit to, or even discuss, a game plan, I think,
is what makes lots of people nervous about encouraging their elected
officials to spend more money now, even if such spending
might help put more of the jobless back to work. They just don’t trust
legislators to exercise self-discipline, even when boom times return.

Rampell is absolutely right that a lot of Americans, especially
right of center, are concerned about the Ricardian impact of
overspending today, because they’re afraid that the other shoe will
drop in the form of taxes or reduced spending in the future. Even
though I support deficit spending, I’ll acknowledge that this is a
legitimate concern. But the “reluctance to commit to, or even discuss, a game plan” goes back to politics.
The “game plan” is going to be ugly.

For example, the bulk of our
long-term debt crisis lives in entitlement spending — Medicare and
Social Security. Reforming entitlements by means-testing both benefits, raising the SS age, or tightening Medicare outlays requires removing benefits from retirees and soon-to-be retirees, who represent both the richest
segments of the population and the most likely to vote. Maybe being the
first politician to propose these kind of changes will earn major
brownie points from reasonable voters. More likely, it will involve a
great weeping and gnashing of dentures, and electoral calamity. Finally…

Maybe the Conrad-Gregg proposal for a “fiscal task force” will help; the verdict is still out.

The Conrad-Gregg proposal shows exactly how serious our elected fiscal hawks are. That is, not at all. The duo’s debt-fighting bill would require a super-majority to pass both the House and Senate. It’s designed to be impossible to pass. Our electeds aren’t afraid of discussing ideas to reduce the deficit. They’re afraid of what happens if we hear them.

Do cell phones give you cancer? The jury is still out. Do cell phones help prevent Alzheimer‘s? The jury is in. They do!

I was going to make a point about how modern technology’s insistence on
perpetual communication continues to show benefits on multitasking and
memory. But it turns out that it’s the cell phone radiation that boosted memory in mice in a recent study.

That said, this is a remarkable sentence:

Previous studies have linked exposure to radiation omitted by cell
phones to increased risk of brain cancer, but this latest study finds
that there could be a silver lining.

A silver lining? To cancer? There must have been a better way to word this.

The Guardian predicts the beginning of the end for America’s car romance:

America’s love affair with the automobile could be sputtering to an
end. Some 14m cars were taken out of action in 2009, 4m more than
rolled off the assembly lines and onto the roads, a report from the Earth Policy Institute said today.

It
was the first time more cars were scrapped than sold since the second
world war, reducing the size of the US car fleet from an all-time high
of 250m to 246m.

Fewer cars and more public transportation would be a perfectly fine development — for commute times, and the environment, and our dependence on foreign energy, and so forth. But I don’t know that this doomsday analysis is entirely fair.
The first half of 2009 was so incredibly devastating for car sales — February was the worst month
in 30 years — that it skews the overall numbers. If you include the
government Cash for Clunkers program last summer and the last few
months of car sales, you get something that looks like a recovery.
Overall car and light truck sales were up 15%
in December 2009 over 2008, despite worries that the Cash for Clunkers
program would cram all of the pent-up car demand into the span of a
couple weeks in July. Ford, in particular,  closed 2009 on an incredible run with sales up one-third from 2008.

If I were a phone service company, I would not be excited about 2010. As Slate’s Farhad Manjoo explains, Google is set to blow up phone industry. No, this isn’t about the Google phone. It’s about Google Voice.

Here’s Manjoo:

Last year, Google
reinvented the phone–but unless you’re among the handful of VIPs who
got access to the U.S.-based, invitation-only service, you probably
haven’t noticed. Google Voice
does several amazing things. It gives you a central phone number that
rings all of your phones–when people call your Voice number, you can
pick up at your office, your cell, or at your vacation house in Bermuda
(and they won’t know the difference). Voice also transcribes your
messages, rendering voice mail obsolete.
And then there’s this: Because it routes all your calls through the
Internet, it lets you call anywhere in the United States for free, and
anywhere in the world for cheap, without a contract.

I’ve been using Voice since its debut–and before that I was a
devotee of GrandCentral, its predecessor–and I find it indispensible.
It has proved more useful than any other technology launched in 2009,
including the new iPhone, Google Wave, and all those e-readers. Among other things, I can now make international calls from my cell phone for no extra charge.

Google
seems to have big plans for Voice. At the moment, the service works by
patching phone calls to your own phone–to make a call, you go to your
Web browser (on either your PC or your smartphone) and type in a phone
number you’d like to call; then Voice rings your phone, and when you
pick up, you’re connected to your mom in Australia! This system (which
is much simpler than it sounds) has a big advantage over Skype and
other Internet-phone services: You don’t need to install special
hardware or software to use it. But it has a disadvantage, too–mainly,
that all calls need to go through the phone system and can’t be routed
directly through a PC. But Google looks to be fixing that–executives
have hinted that they’re building a phone-free version of the software
that would let you make calls through your PC or mobile device (like
you can do with Skype). Google also seems close to opening the service
to more users, even those outside of America. That can’t happen soon
enough–phone companies have long forestalled improvements on their
services (making huge profits, for instance, on voice mail), and Voice promises to finally bring the innovation we’ve seen in the software industry to the phone business.

Google’s recent foray into phone technology really demands serious attention. It’s not just the new Google phone. Or Google Voice. Or the new Android software. Or the purchase of Gizmo5, a Skype-like online phone company. Or the purchase of AdMob, an online ad display company. It’s the fact that these developments basically happened within a few months of each other. Twelve months ago, Google’s contribution to the phone industry was hard to perceive. In 12 months, Google could be a leading hardware developer, the leading software developer for Verizon, a disruptive challenger to the very business model of pay-to-call phone service and the runaway leader in online advertising. It seems to me that Google is prepared to be synonymous with something much vaster than searching in a year’s time.

CareerCast put together a list of the best and worst jobs of 2010. The best job in America is an actuary. The 17th worst job is a journalist. Something is wrong.

The survey considered five criteria — “stress, working environment,
physical demands, income and hiring outlook.” In other words, the
ranking factors in both the quality of the job and the difficulty of
obtaining the job. That makes no sense. Popular jobs will have a worse hiring outlook. But they’re often better jobs! It’s like a college ranking that finds Harvard is one
of the worst schools in America because its admissions rate is so low. Or a Yelp ranking that finds Applebee’s is one of the best restaurants in town because you never have to wait to get a table. It just does not compute.

If you want jobs that are hiring, look to health care and education.
If you want jobs that are “popular”, then be prepared to go up against a lot of applicants. Journalism would be a
good example. This list says being a photojournalist is the 12th worst job in America. That’s crazy. I’d guess the ranking algorithm punished photojournalism precisely because so many people want to do it,
which means it’s hiring outlook is poor. That doesn’t make it a bad
job. It makes it a great job that lots of people want! This is a weird list.

Maybe the Apple Tablet will be spectacular machine. Maybe it will be a spectacular mess. Either way, the e-reader arms race between Apple, Amazon, Sony, Barnes & Noble and Microsoft is spectacular for consumers. Today Amazon announced that it is adding global radio to its Kindle DX, and Microsoft is debuting its own tablet computer tonight. Tablets and e-readers and booklets, oh my! Me, I’m still waiting for the prices to go down.

I’ve written about the e-reader/tablet phenomenon a lot recently, so
rather than bore you with rehashing, I’ll let you peruse the old posts
at your leisure:

How can I compare all these new e-readers? With this handy graph.
What do I think about Apple Tablet mania? I think it’s deserved.
What do I think about the Microsoft Tablet? I think it’s awesome.
Is the E-reader revolution leading us? Closer to a 21st century Swiss Army Knife.
Is the Barnes & Noble Nook better than the Amazon Kindle? Maybe.

Michael Kinsley wrote a column about why news stories should be shorter. It’s really good.

Newspaper stories take too long to tell us what’s new. Banal quotes from experts I’ve never heard of don’t help. Windy introductions to set the geopolitical stage are worthless. Thousand-word front-page articles that provide no more new information than a ticker bulletin aren’t marginally better, but mostly just longer.

The Internet provides the opportunity to break free of the newspaper straitjacket of inverted pyramids and column inches. Google is tinkering with a new thing they call “living stories.” These are topic pages for ideas like “The War in Afghanistan” that create timelines for news stories so you can follow developments and fit them into a storyline. That’s a good idea. Spencer Ackerman says individual writers should try the same thing by using topic tags and the blog format to create updating pages that follow a story’s development. That’s another good idea.

One can imagine the emergence of a kind of “story tree” where all the major developments of a big story like health care reform would live on an constantly updating page. Each new development could have two parts: What Was New (in a sentence) and Why It Mattered (in a paragraph). That’s it. No quotes because the voice is omniscient. No lede because the intro is already on the page. The Internet’s capacity for linking practically begs for stories to talk to each other in a way that is impossible on a single ream of paper. The best way to harness that capacity is to be brief and let your old work do some of the talking.

Finally, here’s a good round-up of reactions to Kinsley’s piece from Atlantic Wire.

Obesity has passed smoking as the country’s biggest health burden. This is partly because Americans are getting fatter, and partly because more smokers are quitting. Is it time for the US to have a more serious anti-obesity policy?

The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, James Fallows and Marc Ambinder debated this very topic last year, and their thoughts are well worth reading.
To sum up with criminal briefness: Megan thinks the common
interventions don’t work; Marc thinks good policy starts with the kids;
and James basically agrees with Marc.

I’d like to try a thought experiment. How are we turning the tide
against the smoking epidemic (smokers have fallen from 22.7 percent of
the population in 1993 to 18.5 percent in 2008)? I can brainstorm three
big fronts against tobacco: (1) new laws (2) new prices and (3)
widespread public relations. In the 1970s we banned TV and radio ads
with cigarettes, and forced cigarettes to print warnings from the
surgeon general. We later banned all tobacco ads in the 1980s. Recently
the federal government forced tobacco companies to print even bigger,
scarier-looking warnings on their products. Locally, big cities like
Chicago and New York have made it hell for smokers to indulge in public
spaces, and smokeless apartments and hotel rooms have proliferated
throughout the last thirty years. Meanwhile, many state taxes have
pushed cigarette prices through the roof, an anti-smoking advocacy
groups have raised hell behind the scenes, waging wars in state
legislatures and Congress, raging against movie studios and ad
companies and standing behind PSAs.

Could US obesity policy benefit from a similar three-pronged attack? The overlap is imperfect, but we can still look for analogs. An obesity policy cut from our cigarette-policy mold might include national laws to ax corn subsidies and local incentives
as small as tax breaks for companies who provide wellness programs. It
might include national or state taxes on junk food and soda. It might
include the emergence of obesity groups that offer sympathy for obese
Americans — since obesity has a more significant genetic component
than a smoking addiction, it would be foolish and unfair to merely
demonize them — but also advertises non-faddish methods for fighting
obesity with sustainable life choices. Whenever you start thinking
about ways to change American habits, the first step is to accept the
reality that it’s very, very difficult. But the fact that cigarette
smoking has fallen about 20 percent in the last 15 years is reason to
think that the effort is not futile.