Lawrence Hecht's Former Blog and Future Info-sharing Outpost

The panel sponsored by National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. The panelists were Michael Azerrand of emusic.com, Amy Phillips, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, Knox Robinson of The Fader, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone and Tracks, and Brandon Wall of prefix magazine. The moderator was Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker.

The event started 15-20 minutes late, and that was after they made the general public wait at the door while working journalists and journalism students were given special seating privileges. Hmmm, the panel had 2-3 graduates of the J-School and except for the band member were all professional writers. I should have anticipated that they would believe that blogging helped instead of challenged them professional.

Since I last posted on the subject of blogging after listening to the Charlie Rose Show, this post will just include bullet points:

Before the presentation, I challenged several of the people sitting around the table that Paul Wolfowitz might not be a bad choice for the World Bank presidency. I got a series of responses that reminded me that the New School had been the last bastion of legitimate Communist Economics. And then the lecture began:

J. Mohan Rao of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst led a workshop at the New School’s Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. These are my observations based on what I heard:

Professor Rao evaluated the impact of India’s economic reforms by comparing economic growth in the 80’s and the 90’s. Since 1980, the Indian economy has had 5-year economic cycles steadily grown and average growth of 5.7%. While growth rates were similar in the 80’s and 90’s, the growth in the 80’s was unsustainably fueled by government debt spending and financial controls. However, the 90′s might have created social inequities.

A government financial crisis in 1991 led to a series of reforms that dealt with openness of finance, foreign trade, and domestic policies. The reforms aimed at globalization, but may not have directly affected external integration. Many of the reforms that were prescribed are similar to those promoted by the IMF and World Bank, and that have been called the American Consensus. The reforms included:

• Reducing non-tariff barriers
• Broadening export incentives
• Reducing tariffs by 80%
• Reducing barriers to foreign direct investment
• Devaluation of the exchange rate
• De-licensing the private sector
• Taking away set-aside sectors for small companies and the public sector

The effectiveness of the reforms was questioned at the workshop. One failure is the social inequity that the reforms MIGHT have caused. The middle class and college educated have benefited, but not everyone. In fact, the manufacturing sector stagnated and agricultural output fell in the last 15 years. That’s significant because 60% of the population is involved in agriculture. Personally, I wish there was stronger, quantitative evidence that the poor’s standard of living declined because of Neo-liberal economic policies.

Another problem with the reforms was that the 80% drop in tariffs was followed by a dramatic drop in government revenues. Public capital was 5.6% of GDP in 1991, but 2.6% of GDP in 2000. This had dramatic ramifications throughout Indian society. Reduced funding limited the government’s ability to regulate. Maybe India wouldn’t face periodic brown-outs if the government had more money to invest in its national infrastructure.

Interesting fact: In the last 14 years, the India’s foreign trade grew from 14% to 26% based on a Trade/GDP ratio. As a comparison, the U.S.’s ratio is 16% and China’s is about 31%.

Between 1991 and the present, Indian IT and IT-enabled Services (i.e., call-centers) were the only sectors that grew dramatically faster than the rest of the economy. Coupled with a world-class higher education system, this has lead many people to think that India can “leapfrog” stages of development into a “knowledge economy”. However, this might not be the best approach. The IT companies compete globally and don’t necessarily have strong links to the rest of the domestic economy. Would a traditional development strategy that focused on industrial jobs have been a better approach?

The Congress Party recently unseated the BJP government because of most people hadn’t benefited from globalization and the economic reforms. Like Lula’s government in Brazil, the Left’s coalition hasn’t made drastic policy changes, but they may want to consider these two policy recommendations:

• Increase income taxes. This will make the rising middle class pay for needed government services.
• Invest in infrastructure projects. China is far ahead of India in this area.

Microsoft’s CIO Ron Markezich spoke to about 100 people at an event sponsored by the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce.

Markezich doesn’t sell software. Instead, he implements it, in addition to telecom and IT hardware, at Microsoft itself. It was extremely interesting hearing how Microsoft’s IT department operates in comparison to its peers at other Fortune 1000 enterprises. Marckezich said that Microsoft uses other vendor’s software if Microsoft doesn’t produce an enterprise-class product in a particular category. In terms of security products, that means they use Computer Associates’ eTrust and Sybari. In the case of Sybari, Microsoft thought anti-virus was such an important feature that they bought the company.

The Microsoft IT department does lab testing and uses all Microsoft products before they are distributed to clients. Using a phrase I never heard before, Markezich says that they “eat their own dog food.” They also help improve their products by using advisory boards. In addition, Microsoft gets end user feedback by sending out employees to clients’ offices for 1-2 weeks at a time. The lessons the IT department learns are often documented as a best practice and then distributed to clients via avenues like a Security Center of Excellence.

The panelists at this Housing Works Used Book Cafe event spend hours each day reading online and print publications. Then, they write about what they read on their blogs. What motivates Maud Newton, Ron Hogan, Laila Lalami, Dennis Loy Johnson, George Murray and Michael Othofer to dedicate a significant part of their lives to their websites? I don’t know? Why am I a political junkie who doesn’t write about politics on the Net?

I attended this event with brooklynvegan, who has some pretty damn good photos of this event on his site. The panel discussion will air on C-SPAN’s BookTV, which is really interesting because I listen/watch it almost every weekend. I listen to C-SPAN, cable news and talk radio as a supplement to my reading. I like listening because it is entertainng and because I just can’t read 24/7.

Literary bloggers are like other bloggers in many ways, but are different because many were already writing their commentary before blogging technology became prevalant and because their writings are a little more snarky and negative just by the very nature of writing book reviews.

Here is my quick analysis of the panelists:
– Dennis Loy Johnson is an excellent moderator and very telegenic.
– Maud Newton is OCD.
– Ron Hogan distinguishes himself by writing up reviews of public readings by authors.
– George Murray is funny and has an appealing personality.
– Laila Laima and Michael Othofer fill niches by writing about international and foreign-language authors.