It is that time of the year again! Time to review the digital events of 2020 and recognize achievements. Your humble correspondent has no idea how to do this at a grand scale without making a mockery of it. If the post can skewer Hollywood at the same time, then all the better.
News today that my PhD Supervisor, Paul Milgrom, won the Nobel prize for economics. He won it with his PhD Supervisor, Bob Wilson. Both were long overdue for the honor.
Take a step back from the daily details of events. Compare the recession unfolding in the United States at this moment with the two previous downturns. Today’s economic events share a surprising set of common features with the dot-com boom and bust of 1997 to 2001, and fewer similarities with the financial meltdown of 2008-09. For reasons I will explain later, we ought to be thankful for the latter.
For IEEE Micro, July-August. The corona virus turned crowded places into transmission hot spots. Coffee shops, popular restaurants, and arenas closed in the United States in March, along with dentist offices, schools, and other places where super-spreading took place. Shelter-in-place mandates went into effect starting on March 17 in many states, and more than forty states instituted such orders by the end of March.
I have started a new email newsletter, Plugging the Gap, that looks at economics and Covid-19. Here is today’s post which overlaps with usual Digitopoly fodder. You can subscribe here.
This week, a new email service, Hey.com, had their app halted (and maybe potentially removed as it had been previously listed by what Apple has called ‘an error’) because they do not offer the ability to purchase the service through the app. Without paying for the app, the Hey service is useless. Thus, Hey offers a subscription fee of $99 per year on their own site.
[Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Professor Paul Milgrom, the co-founder and Chairman of Auctionomics, is the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
I have been spending my quarantine absorbing research on COVID-19 — especially economic research — and, in the process, have written a book, Economics in the Age of COVID-19 that will be published at the end of the month by MIT Press.
What happened in the world of IT? Who deserves notoriety for their behavior? It is time to review 2019, and, while we are at it, make a mockery of the most noteworthy. After all, the world is already messed up, so at least let’s have a bit of fun.