Had to laugh after reading this post from Mr Scoble (link via Alexander van Elsas, who also wrote a post about it) – he has (shock horror) failed to find economic wisdom on FriendFeed. Question is, if you were looking for the keys to the current crisis, would you:

(i) Find it among the sorts of people Mr Scoble likes to listen to ?

(ii) Find it on a Geek-Speak system like Friendfeed?

(iii) Recognise it even if it was there?

ie looking for economic wisdom on Friendfeed is a bit like looking for lost keys under lamp-posts. To explain:

Finding it among the People Mr Scoble likes to listen to – he published a list of people he reads and rates last week – I won’t pretend to know all of them, but of those I do know and read I’d say their expertise is mainly technology and their philosophy on life is by and large Silicon Valley Sufi-ism (or is that Sophistry .

Find it on a System like FriendFeed – there are two issues here:

Firstly, Friendfeed is a hangout for early adopter alpha geeks, it does not have the breadth of view that say blogs or even Twitter does, so its unlikely to have a “Wisdom of Crowds” effect.

Secondly, Friendfeed’s format doesn’t lend itself to serious exploration of hard ideas. Blogs do, and Twitter makes no pretence in the matter (though he haiku-like shortening discipline does bring its own rigour) but Friendfeed is essentially a comment aggregation device, and most people, if they have anything complex to say, prefer to put it on a blog post.

Recognise it when you see it – here again there are two issues.

Firstly, in the nicest possible way, most geeks who inhabit all these lovely new media are not economists, so are unlikely to be able to tell who is right and who is wrong (heck, geeks have to be economically illiterate – no sane economist would do a tech startup – high failure rates, discounted salaries and low margins in the most cases). By the way, RWW does a nice “This is what a geek Needs to Know” over here.

Secondly, economics is apolitical – it kinda doesn’t care whether you are right wing Libertarian or left wing Marxist, it only cares about what works – or more usually, what doesn’t, which makes it deeply unpopular for politicos of all stripes of course (ditto economics and social theories). The truth is, its too early for the correct approach (whatever it is) to be appreciated by all the warring parties at the moment. If I may be so bold – the “correct”answer to this crisis – judging by the things that have worked in similar conditions, say FDR’s New Deal etc – is likely to be more – ahem – socialist than the average US free-market libertarian is likely to want to hear (In fact, my experience of living in the US is that the US Left is more capitalist that Europe’s Right).

It reminds me a lot of Corporate Turnarounds in the early days – there is far more attempting to assign blame and shore up ones own positions for the tough time ahead than actually fix the underlying problem. My old friend (and grizzled turnaround hand) Norman Burgess once encapsulated it in a phrase we forever after referred to as “Burgess’s Law”

First the incumbent management fires the workers, then the market fires the management. Only then can we start to really fix the problems

Tags: Technology