The 20 Percent

by Sam on November 28, 2011

If you simply read the headlines, you’d think that the economy — or at least spending by the average consumer — is on the comeback:

Thanksgiving Day saw an 18% increase in online spending to $479 million.

U.S. consumers have spent $12.7 billion already in the first 25 days of the November to December 2011 holiday season, up 15% from the corresponding days last year.

Sounds good, until you remember that the income gap is real and the average consumer doesn’t matter so much in the broader context:

When discussing “the consumer,” it is important to remember that in reality, “the consumer” is the top 20% of income earners and then everybody else. The top 20% of income earners (who own about 80-90% of the equity market) account for about 40-45% of all spending in the economy.

via Business Insider and TechCrunch

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Hard to Define Jobs and Why Productivity is a Bad Metric

During my weekend readings I came across two snippets that present an interesting take on what the future of work holds. I’m fascinated by the future of work and I’m glad to see some refreshingly unique perspectives on what to expect in terms of evolution…

First Kevin Kelly on why ‘productivity’ is a worthless metric to be optimizing for:

There is more to be gained by producing more opportunities than by optimizing existing ones.

Productivity, however, is exactly the wrong thing to care about in the new economy.

The problem with trying to measure productivity is that it measures only how well people can do the wrong jobs. Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated from the list of jobs that people do.

In the coming era, doing the exactly right next thing is far more fruitful than doing the same thing twice.

Next, Ben Casnocha via Arnold Kling on why ‘hard-to-define’ jobs may be a sign of job security:

Generally, the harder it is to explain to someone you’ve just met at a cocktail party what it is you do on a day to day basis, the more interesting the work you’re engaged in.

Arnold Kling applies a related rule of thumb to job security:

A job seeker is looking for… a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced.

The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.

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Hotel Aggregators Go Real-Time with Notifications

September 12, 2011

This summer while booking my trip to Europe I noticed something I hadn’t seen before across a number of hotel aggregator sites: the use of real-time notifications to ‘let you know’ who is also looking at the same hotel and when the last room booked was. I’m not exactly what I think about this tactic [...]

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Missed Opportunities?

September 1, 2011

Can you consider these startups ‘missed opportunities,’ or did they only come into being because the founder(s) left to work on something outside corporate walls?… Click image for full-size

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Visualizations as Business Intelligence

August 30, 2011

Very cool – I have recently noticed a number of startups such as Betterworks and Square making use of data visualizations as a form of business intelligence. These visualizations also make for compelling eye candy; I’m sure the press and investors eat this stuff up. I look forward to seeing if more startups adopt such [...]

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Notes from Abroad

August 1, 2011

Some notes following an awesome two week vacation to Spain (Barcelona, Rioja, San Sebastian and Bilbao) and London: The number of nice cars in London is outrageous Eating Pinxtos in San Sebastian is the best. Question: why does this style of restaurant not work in a City like New York? Health code? Food prices in [...]

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Search Query Statistics

May 20, 2011

WHAT PERCENTAGE OF SEARCH QUERIES ARE… Commerce or Product Related? Product & sercices ~19%  According to comScore Inc., eBay handled more than 2 billion U.S. product searches in the third quarter. 1 Amazon saw 847 million, while Google handled 226 million product searches over the same period. Source: http://www.ebayinc.com/content/p… Have “Local” Intent? Around 20% of all searches [...]

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2011 Thoughts

January 3, 2011

2010 was a challenging year for me personally and I took a fair amount of time off from blogging. I’m hoping to get back into the groove of writing this year. Initially I thought I’d write a lengthy retrospective about my year, but who wants to dwell in the past? So I’m going do a [...]

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Seth Godin on Doubt

December 5, 2010

The path to entrepreneurship is not an easy one. Sometimes we forget what truly makes an entrepreneur: [Living with doubt] is almost always more profitable than living with certainty. People don’t like doubt, so they pay money and give up opportunities to avoid it. Entrepreneurship is largely about living with doubt, as is creating just [...]

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Income Inequality Continues Relentless Ascent

November 7, 2010

Very interesting article in the New York Times discussing the growing disparity in income among Americans: The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent [article] on inequality, the United States now arguably has a [...]

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