Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, calls out Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors for spending time and money on frivolous projects rather than saving the world from economic doom:

There are huge shocks rolling across the global economic landscape. Here are just a few. Food prices are skyrocketing. The financial system is melting down. Energy, of course, is more and more toxic, and costly. We are all, make no mistake, dancing on the precipice of economic cataclysm.

It is the obligation of radical innovators to create new value by solving these problems - or cede capital and resources to those who can.

But today’s revolutionaries are sheep in wolves’ clothing. They’re lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they’re cutting deals with one another to…try and sell more ads. That is, when they’re not too busy partying.

…

Today’s crop of investors and startups are perhaps even more economically autistic than megacorporations. Too many are willfully blind to today’s deepest and most essential strategic truth: that the path to radical value creation isn’t cutting more deals (dude, high-five!!) - but in rebuilding a flawed, false global economy: one which actively transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, from the sick to the healthy, from productivity to cronyism.

I totally disagree. I’m a firm believer in the “no dollar on the table” principle. If billions could be made by feeding starving Mauritanians, then somebody would be doing it. Idealists like Haque will say that I’m not being creative enough, that surely there’s a “path to radical value creation” that can help the poor and please the shareholders at the same time. Sorry, but it seems that there isn’t.

The reason that people are starving isn’t a lack of innovation and ideas. Take the infamous Haitian mud cakes, for example. It’s terrible and appalling that anyone should be reduced to eating mud. However, it shows that entrepreneurs and innovation abound in even the poorest conditions. And in energy, anyone who can invent a clean renewable energy source that’s cheaper than fossil fuels is going to become a trillionnaire. Suffice to say, people are already working on it.

So rather than blaming Twitter and other frivolous things, how can we fix the economy so that people don’t have to eat mud cakes? If you look at the reasons for rising food prices, many of them can be blamed on economic policies (or a lack of policy). If we really want to help the poor, much more can be done with policy changes than by idealistic hot air aimed at Silicon Valley startups.

(HT: RWW)

I often have the need to pull some economic data from various sources and do a bit of analysis in Excel or whatever. With time-series data especially, it is a pain to pull the new data when a new data point is released (every quarter or whatever) and refresh the analysis. It would be very helpful if there was a standardised format like RSS for data feeds. Then, if it were supported in Excel, I could plug my spreadsheet into that feed and know that my data would be automatically updated.

It doesn’t seem very hard to do, since time series are pretty simple. At a minimum, a feed would just need to contain a description, and then a list of (date, value) pairs comprising the data series. Then all that’s needed is a protocol for publishing and fetching feeds, which could probably work exactly like RSS.

I did a bit of searching, and companies like EcoWin are selling data feeds in some kind of proprietary format, and there are obviously many providers of financial data feeds. What would be more useful is if national statistical agencies and the OECD etc supported a common format and used it to publish the data that they currently provide in less-convenient form on their websites.

Via Felix Salmon, check out this very interesting panel discussion with Felix himself and three other econobloggers about blogging. Naturally you will want to keep watching up to 46 minutes, where 26econ gets a mention. Unfortunately I can’t embed the video here so you’ll have to go watch it at the source. A bunch of interesting topics are discussed, including why bloggers blog, credibility and monetisation.

In my spare time recently I’ve been working on a little project with Alex Kirtland to develop a directory site for these various rating and reputation websites that are popping up all over the place these days. As well as a directory, we have a blog and are working on a “gallery” of reputation and rating systems that should be a useful resource for designers of these systems.

Our directory is split into two types of rating sites — those for products and services, and those for fun. In the latter category, check out Rate My Rosetta and Rate My Turban. Of course, you can also rate the rating sites in our directory.

The site is up and running at 101ratings.com. We’re still adding sites to the directory, and if you run one or know one that isn’t listed, there’s a submission form. Please check it out, tell me what you think, and tell your friends.

Thanks also to loyal blog reader Chewxy for helping me out with some tricky web bits.

In economics, we talk about “margins” all the time, without really thinking about them. Yet, somebody, somewhere is on the margin. There’s someone for whom a 1% increase in food prices is the difference between life and death.

I’m struggling to figure out if it has to be this way in a market economy. Does markets plus people’s individual incentives to procreate mean that there is necessarily always someone who is on the margin of life and death with respect to food (and other) prices? A life-and-death prisoners’ dilemma? Do we need population control at least to ensure this doesn’t happen?

I’m thinking about this because the Washington Post has a special feature about the Global Food Crisis. Part of me wants to think that this is yet more media-driven gloom-and-doom hype. On the other hand, they have a video (available tomorrow) titled On the Margins in Mauritania.