Most Articles in Top Two Economics Journals Receive Zero Citations in First Five Years

Journal quality is often used, or suggested, as a proxy for the quality of articles. It is a very poor proxy.
Economist Robert H. Frank writes that:

(p. 3) The economist Philip Cook and I found, . . . , that in the first five years after publication, many fewer than half of all papers in the two most selective economics journals had ever been cited by other scholars.

For the full commentary, see:

ROBERT H. FRANK. “ECONOMIC VIEW; The Prestige Chase Is Raising College Costs.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., March 11, 2012): 3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated March 10, 2012.)

I assume, but have not verified, that the above finding is reported in:
Frank, Robert, and Philip J. Cook. The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

Diamond to Teach Economics of Entrepreneurship in Fall 2012

EntrepreneurshipPoster2012PortraitTopHalfCropped.jpg

Some Questions to Be Discussed:

• How can policies encouraging innovative entrepreneurship help us recover from the current economic stagnation?

• Are innovative entrepreneurs smarter, or less risk-averse, or more intuitive, or more determined, or more frugal, or nobler, or greedier, than the rest of us?

• Can economic historian John Nye defend his claim that successful entrepreneurs are “lucky fools?”

• What is the role of entrepreneurship in the process of creative destruction, and what is the role of creative destruction in making our lives longer and better?

• Would labor be better off in an economy in which innovative entrepreneurship is encouraged?

• Why does economist Will Baumol believe that too much higher education can discourage successful innovative entrepreneurship?

• What are the most promising sources of financing for successful innovative entrepreneurship?

Lasseter’s Success Came from Seeing How the Details Affected the Storytelling

(p. 138) “I had no reason to think it would be any good,” recalled Barzel, who was then a recently minted California Institute of Technology Ph.D. on the lighting team. “I knew John was absolutely brilliant as a animator of shorts. But I’ve read authors who write good short stories and crummy novels; I figured it’s a different skill. I had no reason to think John would have the skill to pull off a full-length movie.”
He expected something that animators and animation buffs might find interesting, but that probably would not have a particularly wide audience.
“I joined because I wanted the practical experience,” he said, “I thought, Well, it’s going to be the first full-length [computer-animated] movie, so it’ll be a fun thing to have been associated with, however it turns out.”
What finally made Barzel a believer was watching Lasseter at work. He found that Lasseter had an uncanny ability to shift between the macro level of the entire film and the micro level of whatever detail he was dealing with at the moment. “Looking at an individual frame — it’s meticulous work– he would always be aware of its role in the larger context of storytelling,” Barzel recalled. “He’d say something like, ‘This is the first time this character responds to that situation; it’s really important that he get the right glint in his eye.’ ” Barzel started to think, John knows what he’s doing. This movie could be really good.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics and brackets in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Lean Start-Ups “Ruthlessly Cull Failures”

eric-ries-lean-startup.jpgEric Ries and his book. Source of photo: http://nemonics.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/eric-ries-lean-startup.jpg?w=584&h=262

(p. D3) “What’s different in the Valley is that we’ve found a quasi-scientific method for reinventing businesses and industries, not just products,” said Randy Komisar, a partner in a leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a lecturer on entrepreneurship at Stanford University. “The approach is much more systematic than it was several years ago.”

The newer model for starting businesses relies on hypothesis, experiment and testing in the marketplace, from the day a company is founded. That is a sharp break with the traditional approach of drawing up a business plan, setting financial targets, building a finished product and then rolling out the business and hoping to succeed. It was time-consuming and costly.
The preferred formula today is often called the “lean start-up.” Its foremost proponents include Eric Ries, an engineer, entrepreneur and author who coined the term and is now an entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard Business School, and Steven Blank, a serial entrepreneur, author and lecturer at Stanford.
The approach emphasizes quickly developing “minimum viable products,” low-cost versions that are shown to customers for reaction, and then improved. Flexibility is the other hallmark. Test business models and ideas, and ruthlessly cull failures and move on to Plan B, Plan C, Plan D and so on — “pivoting,” as the process is known.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR. “Looking Backward to Put New Technologies in Focus.” The New York Times (Tues., December 6, 2011): D3 & D4.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated December 5, 2011.)

Ries’ recent book is:
Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Business, 2011.

Blank’s books are:
Blank, Steve. Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost. CafePress.com, 2010.
Blank, Steven Gary. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win. 2nd ed: CafePress.com, 2005.
Blank, Steve, and Bob Dorf. The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company. K & S Ranch, 2012.

Another relevant book is:
Maurya, Ash. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2012.

Millennials Wiser on Environment than Gen Xers and Baby Boomers

(p. 6A) “I was shocked,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University who is one of the study’s authors.
. . .
Researchers found that, when surveyed decades ago, about a third of young baby boomers said it was important to become personally involved in programs to clean up the environment. In comparison, only about a quarter of young Gen Xers – and 21 percent of Millennials – said the same.
Meanwhile, 15 percent of Millennials said they had made no effort to help the environment, compared with 8 percent of young Gen Xers and 5 percent of young baby boomers.
. . .
The analysis was based on two long-term surveys of the nation’s youth. The first, the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future project, is an annual survey of thousands of high school seniors, from which data from 1976 through 2008 was used.
Other data came from the American Freshman project, another large annual national survey, administered by the Higher Education Research Institute. Those responses came from thousands of first-year college students, from the years 1966 through 2009. Because of the large sample sizes, the margin of error was less than plus-or-minus half a percentage point.

For the full story, see:
MARTHA IRVINE. “‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ Not a Mantra for Young People.” Omaha World-Herald (Sat., March 17, 2012): 6A.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated Thursday March 15, 2012 and had the title “Study: Young people not so ‘green’ after all.”)

“Being Able to Work on a Great Project”

(p. 133) Recruiting was brisk; the magnet for talent was not the pay, generally mediocre, but rather the allure of taking part in the first fully computer-animated feature film. “Disney gave us a very modest budget [$17.5 million] for Toy Story,” Guggenheim said. “Although that budget went up progressively over time, it didn’t afford for very high salaries, unfortunately. We tried to make the other working conditions better. Just the enthusiasm of being able to work on a great project is as often as not what attracts artists and animators.”

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics and brackets in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Quantum Computers May Revolutionize Nanotechnology and Drug Design

AaronsonScottMIT201-03-11.jpg

“Scott Aaronson.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT commentary quoted and cited below.

(p. D5) When people hear that I work on quantum computing — one of the most radical proposals for the future of computation — their first question is usually, “So when can I expect a working quantum computer on my desk?” Often they bring up breathless news reports about commercial quantum computers right around the corner. After I explain the strained relationship between those reports and reality, they ask: “Then when? In 10 years? Twenty?”

Unfortunately, this is sort of like asking Charles Babbage, who drew up the first blueprints for a general-purpose computer in the 1830s, whether his contraption would be hitting store shelves by the 1840s or the 1850s. Could Babbage have foreseen the specific technologies — the vacuum tube and transistor — that would make his vision a reality more than a century later? Today’s quantum computing researchers are in a similar bind. They have a compelling blueprint for a new type of computer, one that could, in seconds, solve certain problems that would probably take eons for today’s fastest supercomputers. But some of the required construction materials don’t yet exist.
. . .
While code-breaking understandably grabs the headlines, it’s the more humdrum application of quantum computers — simulating quantum physics and chemistry — that has the potential to revolutionize fields from nanotechnology to drug design.
. . .
Like fusion power, practical quantum computers are a tantalizing possibility that the 21st century may or may not bring — depending on the jagged course not only of science and technology, but of politics and economics.

For the full commentary, see:
SCOTT AARONSON. “ESSAY; Quantum Computing Promises New Insights, Not Just Supermachines.” The New York Times (Tues., December 6, 2011): D5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated December 5, 2011.)

Museum Visitors Vote With Feet for Reagan Over Lincoln

(p. 9A) For the first time since it opened, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Mu­seum in Springfield, Ill., is no longer the nation’s most visited presidential museum. It’s been overtaken by Ronald Reagan’s museum in Simi Valley, Calif.
Lincoln’s museum had been tops since it opened in 2005, rid­ing the appeal of its Disney-like re-creations of the president’s life. But last year it counted 293,135 visitors — short of Rea­gan’s 367,506.

For the full story, see:
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. “Hail to the new chief.” Omaha World-Herald (Sun., March 18, 2012): 9A.

Small Is Beautiful as Life Adapts to Global Warming

SifrhippusFirstHorse2012-03-10.jpg “Artist’s reconstruction of Sifrhippus sandrae (right) touching noses with a modern Morgan horse (left) that stands about 5 feet high at the shoulders and weighs approximately 1000 lbs.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) The horse (siff-RIP-us, if you have to say the name out loud) lived in what is still horse country, in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming, where wild mustangs roam.
. . .
Its preserved fossils, abundant in the Bighorn Basin, provide an excellent record of its size change over a 175,000-year warm period in the Earth’s history known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures are estimated to have risen by 9 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit at the start, and dropped again at the end.
Scientists have known that many mammals appear to have shrunk during the warming period, and the phenomenon fits well with what is known as Bergmann’s rule, which says, roughly, that mammals of a given genus or species are smaller in hotter climates.
Although the rule refers to differences in location, it seemed also to apply to changes over time. But fine enough detail was lacking until now.
In Science, Ross Secord, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Jonathan Bloch, of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville; and a team of other researchers report on the collection and analysis of Sifrhippus fossils from the Bighorn Basin.
They report that the little horse got 30 percent smaller over the first 130,000 years, and then — as always seems to happen with weight loss — shot back up and got 75 percent bigger over the next 45,000 years.
. . .
“It seems to be natural selection,” said Dr. Secord. He said animals evolved to be smaller during warming because smaller animals did better in that environment, perhaps because the smaller an animal is, the easier it is to shed excess heat.

For the full story, see:
JAMES GORMAN. “As the Planet Heated Up, First Horse Got Tinier .” The New York Times (Tues., February 28, 2012): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated February 23 [sic], 2012 and has the title “A Tiny Horse That Got Even Tinier as the Planet Heated Up.”)

Innovative Entrepreneurs Need to Be Able to Fire People

(p. 116) Jobs met with the remaining employees soon after the layoffs and brought his reality distortion field with him. “You’re seeing your friends packing their stuff up and pushing it out to their cars,” Phillips remembered, “and yet somehow he had convinced you that that was the greatest possible thing that could happen.”
Within the Silicon Valley community, the talk was not of the way Jobs had handled his former employees at Pixar, but of his having kept Pixar going at all. It seemed to make little sense from a business point of view. For all his bravado about RenderMan, his motivation was likely a matter of status as much as economics. After his rise and fall at Apple, the onus was on him either to create another success story or to leave his peers to conclude that the first one had been a quirk of fate.
“It wasn’t really working,” Smith said of Pixar’s early years. “In fact, that’s being kind of gentle. We should have failed. But it seemed to me that Steve just would not suffer a defeat. He couldn’t sustain it.”

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)