Should Congress extend the CARES Act supplemental UI benefits of $600 per week?
The CARES Act provided supplemental unemployment insurance benefits of $600 a week to all workers who qualify for benefits. These benefits expire at the end of July. Should these supplemental benefits be extended? Why or why not?
Congress should extend the $600-per-week supplemental unemployment insurance (UI) benefits.
Many Americans are relying on the supplemental UI benefits (as well as the $1,200 direct stimulus payments) to stay afloat. In June, the unemployment rate was 11.1%—lower than in April (14.7%) and May (13.3%), but still much, much higher than the February rate of 3.5%.[1] Many Americans were in precarious financial positions before the recession.[2] In June, Bhutta et al. (2020) found that “nearly half of families who lose their income for six months would not be able to cover their expenses due to low levels of liquid saving and standard UI benefits that do not fully replace income.”[3]
The cash assistance provided by the CARES Act is “keeping the economy from cratering further” (Nunn, Parsons, and Shambaugh 2020). Garcia and Smith (2020) articulate this idea well:
If people have money to spend on groceries, then the grocery store can afford to pay its own workers. And the grocery store will also order more food from farmers. And that means that the farmers will have money to order equipment from manufacturing companies and so on. Consumer spending is the lifeblood of an economy.
An economy is a web of relationships and forming such relationships is expensive. Consider, for example, the costs associated with hiring employees, vetting renters, and starting new businesses. The cash assistance provided by the CARES Act is keeping economic relationships in place. By doing so, it is setting up the economy to recover faster once the pandemic is over.[4]
Could $600 per week be so generous as to discourage people from working? According to Ganong, Noel, and Vavra (2020), “two-thirds of eligible workers can receive benefits which exceed lost earnings and one-fifth can receive benefits at least double lost earnings.”[5][6] Mitman and Rabinovich (2020) thus suggest “lowering [the supplemental UI benefits] as the economy starts to reopen” and replacing them with a reemployment bonus.
Perhaps Congress should have avoided supplementing UI benefits in the first place. Many European countries are subsidizing wages instead; this approach might maintain employer-employee relationships more effectively. Alternatively, larger direct stimulus payments (larger than $1,200) in lieu of generous UI benefits would avoid disincentivizing work.
However, at this point Congress should “stay the course” rather than engineer a new policy. Extending the CARES Act benefits is conceptually simple, and simple policies are more politically tenable as well as more likely to be implemented well.
The need for the $600-per-week supplemental UI benefits remains. These benefits should be extended.
Notes
[1] Unemployment today remains higher than it was during the Great Recession, when unemployment peaked at 10.0% in October 2009.
[2] Bhutta and Dettling (2018) estimated that only 76% of American households have $400 or more in liquid savings. Similarly, the Federal Reserve’s (2019) “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2018” found that 4 in 10 American families would be unable to pay an unexpected $400 expense out-of-pocket. Needless to say, households in such a precarious financial positions would likely need the $600-per-week supplemental UI benefits to meet basic needs.
[3] Bhutta et al. (2020) also raised concerns about equity: “Families working in industries with the highest unemployment rates in April . . . would be least likely to be able to cover several months of expenses . . . . Similarly, lower-income families and minority families tend to be less well-equipped to weather the downturn.”
[4] Cheng et al. (2020) studied current unemployment trends and found that:
Rate of reemployment decreases with time since job loss . . . . [E]mployment relationships are durable in the short run, but . . . employment gains requiring new employment matches may not be as rapid and may be particularly slow for hard-hit groups including Hispanic and Black workers, youngest and oldest workers, and women.
Similarly, Carroll, Slacalek, and White (2020) add that:
If the lockdown is short-lived, the combination of expanded unemployment insurance benefits and stimulus payments should be sufficient to allow a swift recovery in consumer spending to its pre-crisis levels. If the lockdown lasts longer, an extension of enhanced unemployment benefits will likely be necessary if consumption spending is to recover.
[5] Bhutta et al. (2020): “For a full-time worker who was earning the federal minimum wage prior to losing their job, the increased UI benefits would be nearly three times their previous weekly wages.”
[6] That number includes this author, and he personally finds the $600-per-week supplemental UI benefits to be a disincentive to work. But he decided to remain employed because UI benefits are limited and cannot be claimed indefinitely.
That experience matches up to an analysis by Bhutta et al. (2020): “Although UI benefits will generate an increase in income for many families experiencing job loss, this boost to incomes is temporary and families will . . . save the ‘extra’ income if they anticipate unemployment spells to last beyond July.” Bhutta et al. argue that “consumption expenditure declined over 13% in April even while personal income (including transfers) increased by 10%” because recipients of the supplemental UI benefits are saving any extra income.
References
Bhutta, Neil, Jacqueline Blair, Lisa J. Dettling, and Kevin B. Moore. July 2020. “COVID-19, the CARES Act, and Families’ Financial Security.” https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3631903. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3631903.
Bhutta, Neil, and Lisa Dettling. November 19, 2018. “Money in the Bank? Assessing Families’ Liquid Savings using the Survey of Consumer Finances.” FEDS Notes. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Accessed July 21, 2020. https://doi.org/10.17016/2380-7172.2275. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/assessing-families-liquid-savings-using-the-survey-of-consumer-finances-20181119.htm.
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. May 28, 2019. “Dealing with Unexpected Expenses.” Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2018. The Federal Reserve System. Accessed July 21, 2020. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2018-dealing-with-unexpected-expenses.htm.
Carroll, Christopher D., Jiri Slacalek, and Matthew N. White. July 8, 2020. “Modeling the Consumption Response to the Cares Act.” ECB Working Paper No. 20202441. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3645999.
Cheng, Wei, Patrick Carlin, Joanna Carroll, Sumedha Gupta, Felipe Lozano Rojas, Laura Montenovo, Thuy D. Nguyen, Ian M. Schmutte, Olga Scrivner, Kosali I. Simon, Coady Wing, and Bruce Weinberg. July 2020. “Back to Business and (Re)employing Workers? Labor Market Activity During State COVID-19 Reopenings.” NBER Working Paper No. 27419. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27419. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27419.
Ganong, Peter, Pascal J. Noel, and Joseph S. Vavra. May 2020. “US Unemployment Insurance Replacement Rates During the Pandemic.” NBER Working Paper No. 27216. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27216. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27216.
Garcia, Cardiff, and Stacey Vanek Smith, “This Weekend's (Fiscal) Cliffhanger,” July 20, 2020, in The Indicator from Planet Money, produced by Darius Rafieyan, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/893297452.
Mitman, Kurt, and Stanislav Rabinovich. June 29, 2020. “Optimal Unemployment Benefits in the Pandemic.” CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP14915. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3638019.
Nunn, Ryan, Jana Parsons, and Jay Shambaugh. May 13, 2020. “Incomes have crashed. How much has unemployment insurance helped?” The Brookings Institution. Accessed July 21, 2020. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/13/incomes-have-crashed-how-much-has- unemployment-insurance-helped/.
Rothwell, Jonathan. May 27, 2020. “The effects of COVID-19 on international labor markets: An update.” Middle Class Memos. The Brookings Institute. Accessed July 25, 2020. https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-effects-of-covid-19-on-international-labor-markets-an-update/.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. June 2020. “The Employment Situation—June 2020.” U.S. Department of Labor. Last Modified July 2, 2020. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf.
Evernote: I had such high hopes
I've been an Evernote Premium user since 2009. I used it for reference material (in GTD parlance): journal entries; class notes; scanned PDFs and documents (at that point, the OCR capabilities were a Premium feature and the main reason I upgraded). Back in 2009, I also had a netbook running Windows in addition to my MacBook Pro; Evernote's omnipresence across software platforms was a huge selling point. As a college student, my work life was nomadic. If I wanted the check my email in between classes and hadn't brought my heavy laptop, then I'd use a public computer. Evernote's webapp was a helpful way to have my reference material always on-hand. Over the years, I've made almost 10,000 notes.
In mid-2016, I set up Evernote to be my task manager as well. I'd been using Omnifocus for years. It's robust and reliable and deservedly one of the gold standards in task management. But Omnifocus is also designed for GTD. I would filled out contexts for my tasks but I never used contexts. It always made more sense to me to work on projects with my end goal in mind. I switched to Evernote, then, because I knew the app was so flexible that I'd be able to set up a task management system more reflective of how I naturally worked. Also, Evernote's crossplatform capabilities were again a boon: I was pursuing jobs where I'd have to use a PC rather than a Mac. I'd be all set up on any new computer just with a quick install of Evernote.
But, almost a year later, I'm reverting back to using Evernote just for reference material. The main reason is that Evernote's iOS app is bafflingly unusable. It freezes when I'm editing notes and when I'm switching notebooks. The app lags whenever it syncs: I get the best performance when I switch into Airplane mode. I've complained to their support team countless times over the past few months; they once asked me to take a video of the issue for them. Right now, I'm getting an "Unable to sync" error whenever I try to synce the mobile app. One of my notes apparently has "invalid content"—I'll need to delete the note in order to fix the issue. It's a simple fix, but I need to be at my computer in order to do it. In the meantime, the error message pops up repeatedly—every few seconds—while I'm using the app and makes the app unusuable. I find myself using workarounds to get content into Evernote: it's faster to write an email and send to my "email to Evernote" address than it is to open the app and write a note. Evernote for OS X seems solid, but Evernote's iOS team is horrible.
A simple and cheap way to fix the performance issues would just be to have the app sync less frequently. If I'm using Evernote on iOS, then I can't be using Evernote somewhere—I can't be in two places at once. Why does the app sync every few seconds? The app could simply sync whenever I open or close it—and preferably have left it closed for a long enough period that it's clear I'm not just switching apps before returning to Evernote to finish editing a note. Best of all, changing the sync schedule requires almost no engineering time—it's not a redesign. I'm surprised their product management team hasn't suggested this solution, and I'm surprised their iOS QA team hasn't caught or surfaced these issues. They're clearly not testing with enough edge cases, such as the large databases their longtime users would be likely to have.
So I'm switching back to a dedicated task manager. So far, Things 3 is looking really good. I'll continue to use Evernote for reference material. I have so much content stored in it already that I can't switch without investing tons of time. I'm locked in.
Others have expressed similar sentiments:
Evernote, the Bug-Ridden Elephant by Jason Kincaid (This article is from 2014, but it received some publicity, especially when then-CEO Phil Libin responded. The article's still a top hit if you search for "evernote bugs" and it's criticisms remain true. Especially disappointing is that Kincaid's complaints the iOS still remain problems, despite Evernote's major 8.0 release in 2017. The Evernote iOS app just consistently sucks.)
Evernote's Redesign is Too Little, Too Late by Casey Newton on The Verge (2017)
What’s the ideal page size for designing fixed layout ebooks?
What are the ideal page dimensions to use when designing your fixed layout ebook?
It depends upon what your goals are:
Are you trying to fill the full viewport and minimize the screen space devoted to the reader "chrome" (e.g., the gray latticework background in iBooks)?
Are you going to be displaying one page at a time or a two-page spread?
Are you targeting a specific platform for the end product and will you be designing two different versions or the ebook? Or trying to create a single cross-platform design?
Are you just trying to get a rough sense of page dimensions to use so that you can make sure that the text is legible?
Are you trying to take full advantage of the latest devices or do you want to support customers with lower-end devices as well?
The core challenge you'll run into when designing a fixed layout ebook for multiple devices is that different devices have different screen sizes. The dimensions of the screen — as measured in pixels per side — are not as much of an issue as the aspect ratio which they create.
To calculate the aspect ratio for a display, divide the width by the height. For example, the iPad 3's screen is 2048 pixels by 1536 pixels. This works out to a 4:3 aspect ratio: 2048 / 1536 = 1.3 = 4/3. 4:3 is a very common aspect ratio: it's used for most television screens and computer monitors as well as for standard definition video.
The most common targets for a fixed layout ebook are the Apple iPad and the Kindle Fire devices. These two device lines, though, have screens with different aspect ratios and so it's impossible for a single design to work perfectly on both devices. The iPad screen is comparably fatter than the Kindle Fire screens; more precisely, the iPad screen has a 4:3 aspect ratio where as the Kindle Fires have a longer and narrower 16:10 aspect ratio. If you design a fixed layout ebook for one device, then the pages will be pillared or letterboxed when you port to the other platform.
It's also difficult to nail down a precise page dimensions to design for because different devices in the same line may have screens with different pixel counts depending upon their display resolutions. For instance, the iPad 3 is a retina device and the screen has twice as many pixels per side as the original iPad 1 and iPad 2. There is a similar relationships between the first generation Kindle Fire and the later-generation Kindle Fire HD devices.
Note that display resolution is independent of the aspect ratio. For the reader, the display resolution mainly affects how crisp and clear the image is. For the designer, the resolution is a consideration, albeit a minor one. Optimizing for a higher resolution device may cause text which is very small to become illegible if the ebook is read on a lower resolution device. On the other hand, optimizing for a lower resolution device may lead to a lot of empty, wasted space if the ebook is read on a higher resolution device. Usually the ebook can be developed in such a way as to minimize these discrepancies, so it's almost always better to design for a particular aspect ratio rather than precise page dimensions as measured in pixels.
If you do need to nail down precise page dimensions to design for, then you could use the below dimensions depending upon where your priorities or goals lie.
If you want to target the iPad, then design for page dimensions which have a 4:3 or 1.3 aspect ratio (for instance, of 1024 px by 768 px or 2048 px by 1536 px or similar).
If you want to absolutely minimize the reader app chrome on an iPad, use dimensions of 1900 px by 1470 px. Liz Castro has done some excellent work to figure out that these are the optimum dimensions to use the full available viewport on an iPad (the viewport would be the screen, minus the reader app chrome such as the menu bar at the top of the iPad and book/page UI).
If you want to target Kindle Fire devices, then design for page dimensions which have a 16:10 or 1.6 aspect ratio (for instance, 1280 px by 800 px or 1920 px by 1200 px or similar).
If you want a "cross-platform" design, then design for page dimensions which have a 16:9 or 1.7 aspect ratio, which is the standard HD aspect ratio internationally. Example page dimensions would be 1920 px by 1080 px or 2560 px by 1600 px or similar.
I generally recommend the larger of the two options for each goal because high resolution devices are becoming much, much more common and will likely become the norm soon (for instance, Apple opted not to support the iPad 1 and iPad 2 when it released the latest iOS updates). As mentioned, too, it's almost always better to design for a particular aspect ratio rather than precise page dimensions because further device optimizations can be handled by the developer.
The “Get Hit by a Bus Protocol”: How to Protect Your Company From Sudden Staffing Changes and Build a More Flexible Team
When I first started commuting to work by bike, I never wore a helmet. After a few weeks of nagging from my boss, though, I capitulated and bought a helmet.
This is what my boss said to convince me: "If you get hit by a bus, then the company's gone!” He was exaggerating, but the point was spot-on nonetheless.
If you work at a small company (say, around 10 people), you can easily become too integral to your team. It’s fantastic to take ownership of projects and responsibilities, but you want to make sure that the business can proceed smoothly even without your personal intervention.
Some may argue that making yourself essential to a company is great for job security, but I think that removing oneself from the equation is better for the company as a whole — and makes you a better employee. People are expensive. The less the business relies anyone's direct intervention, the better it can scale and the more sustainable it will be in the long run.
Having day-to-day operations directly dependent on any one individual is also just dangerous. Everyone needs a vacation, and everyone gets sick. There are also unplanned absences — maybe a relative gets sick, or maybe, ahem, you get hit by a bus.
At a start-up, staffing changes are inevitable. Someone may leave for a different job elsewhere and/or a new team member may come on board. You want your company to be able to roll with these punches without too much difficulty.
Below is my "Get Hit by a Bus Protocol” — the steps everyone should follow in order to make the team more flexible (for its own good).
1. Document everything
Document all regular processes and procedures: how to set up the office printer; how to handle your biggest clients; how to respond to customers on common problems; how to make widgets; how you make your day-to-day decisions. Document, document, document.
As production coordinator at Vook, I keep a 7-page Google Doc which has step-by-step instructions for how to keep our production pipeline moving even in my absence. It covers nearly every scenario: how to manage a cover design job; how to produce a fixed layout ebook; how to scan a print book. I try to detail the processes as clearly as possible — almost as if I were writing a program for a computer to follow. Algorithms (if X is the case, then do Y and Z) tend to be easy for people to follow and also give a good grounding for later automation, if possible.
When your documentation is strong, you can onboard new team members easily. It’s much faster to point a new team member to a wiki or knowledge database than to spend time on individual, in-person training. In-person training costs the time of both the trainee and the one doing the training. Documentation can provide the basics and also give new team member materials to reference later.
This advice applies regardless of the role you’re in, but developers also have an extra responsibility to be commenting their code for later human readability. Any developer worth hiring, though, should be doing this already.
2. Store materials in a centralized location
I have been too often frustrated by not being able to get the files I need to finish a project because they’re stored on a coworker’s computer. Agh! This wastes the time of both me and my time.
Project files and any supporting materials should always be stored in a location where other team members can easily access them. Download project files to work on them locally, but remember to archive everything at the end of the day.
There are a variety of tools for this: Dropbox, Google Drive, Box — the list goes on. At Vook, we actually use a custom-built dashboard which supports file sharing between both team member and our clients.
Just think about storing files to the cloud. This isn't the same as backing up — which you should be doing anyway — because it’s more about sharing and decentralization. Digital files are more permanent print than physical goods simply because it's so easy to make copies. So make copies! Nothing should ever, ever, EVER be stored locally only.
3. Take frequent vacations
Vacations force you to see how things go in your absence. Vacations are safe ways to test your team's flexibility — i.e., without anyone actually getting hit by a bus — and have the bonus of recharging your team and preventing burn out. If you've already put in place processes to make yourself inessential, then vacations will furthermore test how good of a job you've done.
I like to take psuedo-vacations: for 2-3 days before I'm actually away, I'll have another team member cover my role while I work on projects I've had on the back burner. This gives the person covering my position the opportunity to ask questions while I'm still there — the answers to which I will then document — and it makes me more confident that things will run smoothly in my absence.
4. Automate
All routine processes should be handled automatically. Automation is probably best practiced by backend developers. If you’re not a developer, though, think strategically about your work: what can be automated, and how could it be automated? Typically, the more specifically you can explain a project, the easier it will be for a developer to build. Then try to get the project into your team’s queue. Or, consider a low-tech workaround. Many applications have automation functionality built in. With a little digging, you can set up email auto-responders, IFTTT recipes, Mac Automator programs, Photoshop scripts, etc.
Service with a Smile (Just Not If You're Taking Your Bike on Amtrak)
This is the first day of my vacation: my girlfriend and I are going biking in upstate New York. The plan was to take the Amtrak to Syracuse. We'd check our bikes to get them onto Amtrak, and then from Syracuse we'd bike east along the Erie Canal.
Only a few minutes into the journey, though, and already we're off track. We arrived at Penn Station two hours before our train was supposed to leave — plenty of time to check our bikes, we thought. To get your bikes onto Amtrak, you have to partially disassemble them: you have to take off the pedals and then turn the handlebars partway in order to fit the bike into an Amtrak-provided box ($10 for the box, $20 for the handling). Disassembling the bikes proved to be harder to do than I thought. By the time we had them ready to ship, the woman at the baggage check informed we had missed the cut off to check the bags. By how much had we missed the cut off? A mere 8 minutes.
Once on board, we then were informed by a junior conductor that we couldn't sit in a clearly open two-seater by the window because he was reserving it for families. Instead we had to sit in a darker two-seater — no window — which was one row forward. I swear, this train car is half-empty and the two rows look identical to me. No flexibility at all.
I've taken Amtrak tons of times before and this is by far the worst experience. This reminds me that it is so key, when you're in a service business, to be investing in good people who enjoy working with customers. Every service has a set scope and there are always rules to adhere to — but at some point you have to understand the customer and know when those rules can be broken.
The junior conductor who wouldn't move us a seat back — to a window seat — justified his actions by talking about job security. He said he needed to adhere to the rules or he would lose his job. But it doesn't work like that. If your job is just interpreting a series of options within a defined rule set, then your job can be easily automated. A robot could do it. These Amtrak trains could be fully automated: purchase a seat online (just like purchasing a seat in a concert hall or for a play); scan your ticket at the door; and then walk to your designated seat. No human intervention required.
Amtrak, you can have that tip pro-bono.
But, truthfully, I like interacting with human beings. Some services can be automated to improve efficiency, but at some point you're going to be dealing with a human being. Either that human is the customer or — especially in a service-oriented business — it's the person doing the selling or performing the service.
If you're the person who's performing the service — well, I realize you may be coming off an 8-hour shift which probably started at 5 AM, and I realize you can't perform miracles. But, please, treat me like a human being and I will reciprocate.
This is a practice I take into my daily work. Sure, work is hard — but treating your customers, clients, and co-workers civilly goes along way. Personally, making a customer happy is one of the best parts of my day. Customers don't always say "thank you" — after all, the are paying me, so I don't really expect it. But when they do... Well, let's just say I save those emails. They brighten my day.
Finally, hat tip to two organizations who helped out during this fiasco:
TSA. Thank you to the TSA agent who saw us struggling with our bikes and walked with me to the hardware store to pick out a wrench. Above and beyond the call of duty on his part and a big thank you for the kindness.
Bicycle Habitat. As usual, these guys are awesome. Thanks to the mechanic who helped remove the pedals from my girlfriend's bike and let me watch while he did it. These guys always offer solid advice. Bicycle Habitat is my go-to shop — they have shops in Soho, Park Slope, and Chelsea — and if you're a NYC cyclist they should be your go-to shop, too. The Park Slope shop stayed open an extra hour last night to give me a last minute tune-up (and offered me some cold veggie pizza from their lunch — mmm). Thanks again, guys!
Why Apple Wins in Mobile
I took an introduction to iOS app development workshop this weekend. It was at GA and taught by some of the generous and talented developers at BitFountain.
If you've ever programmed before, you know how challenging it can be. I do mostly front-end work for Vook; ebooks, at their core, are just bundles of HTML and CSS. And when an ebook is broken on a certain device (which, for all intensive purposes, is just a browser), I've wracked my head for hours trying to find typos in my CSS or errors in my mark-up.
Enter the world of Xcode. Programming in Apple's development environment is a dream:
Libraries of quality code are pre-built for you. If you wanted, you could combine them like Lego blocks to easily form an entirely new program. All that's needed is the inspiration.
These libraries of code are not unique to iOS development; there are libraries out there for other languages as well. But, man, having them pre-loaded right into your software development environment is amazing.
Inline validation and auto-complete. Xcode tests your code as you write it and let you know at the moment you write a new line of code if you have a bug. Similarly, Xcode remembers the names of all of your variables--and of those in its pre-built libraries--and will begin to auto-complete them for you as you type. This does encourage you to use long and very verbose variable names, but... It makes TextMate or NotePad++ look like something from 1991.
iOS emulator. As soon as your code is done, you can compile and test right on your computer. This is amazing. With the front-end work I've been doing, I have to actually load a site into multiple browsers at multiple screen sizes and basically test everything manually. What a drag! There are some differences between the emulator and the actual device, but the emulator is good enough for you to quickly to get a sense of whether the new code you wrote seems to be working or you need to revisit the drawing board. Deeper QA can happen later.
UI. If you're visually oriented, you can drag and drop buttons and the like and then style them the way you want in the Storyboard mode. Xcode does the heavy lifting to create the correspond code. This is invaluable for designers who want to dip into app development.
It's no wonder, that iOS has been such a dominant mobile platform for so long. The Xcode software development kit (SDK) makes programming apps surprisingly easy and incredibly fun.
When you're trying to create a platform, building out robust tools for contributors is key. The easier it is for others to publish on your platform, the more high-quality content you will have and ultimately the more valuable your platform will be. It's a decentralized model: create the tools for others to contribute.
Blogs are Like Belly Buttons
Recently another writer asked a superb question in the Fiction Writers Guild on LinkedIn:
Blogs are sort of like belly buttons—everyone's got one. How do I get people to follow mine?
My response:
How do I get people to follow *my* blog? That's the question on everyone's minds. Standing out in social media is a tricky game.
Red Lemonade would be great because the community is young. You would have the first-mover advantage: you would gain followers simply because there are currently fewer other writers competing for your reader's eyeballs. The same thing happened with Twitter—the early adopters gained lots of followers simply by showing up.
If you do go the Wordpress, Blogger, or public-blog route, you could always cross-promote your posts. Every time you post a new installment, Tweet about in and post about it here. Make friends on Twitter and make friends among other bloggers who can give you a shout-out. Try to get the momentum going.
Instead of starting your own independent blog, try to piggy back off of another website's social cache. See if you can find a website willing to publish your novel in installments. For instance, if I were writing literary fiction, I would pitch my idea to The Millions, Granta, or the Paris Review—all of which have websites for which they need a regular stream of quality, original content.
Pitching to an online magazine is a new idea that I'm not sure many people have tried. What do you think? Would it be a good way to gain exposure?
Having a blog following is essential for the aspiring writer. Whether you're pitching to publishers or publishing yourself, your online following can translate into the sales that make your time investment worthwhile.
Three Month Summary
This course has exposed me to the burgeoning field of behavioral economics. Neoclassical economics may be the “study of resource allocation under scarcity,” but behavioral economics is a blend of economics and psychology—the study of how people actually make decisions. Neoclassical models necessarily make simplifying assumptions, and behavioral economics explains the glitches and phenomena that traditional theory excludes. Laboratory experiments in both psychology and economics departments have demonstrated that while the rational consumer is a useful construct, he is ultimately fictitious.
As Clay Shirky shows in Cognitive Surplus, and as Chris Anderson to a lesser degree demonstrates in Free, people often behave in ways that are not profit-maximizing. The traditional foil to neoclassical theory is the ultimatum game: responders will turn down free money if they believe they are receiving an unfair deal. And, as William Poundstone explains in Priceless, decision-making can be influenced by hormones, blood alcohol content, race, gender, and other human variables. Poundstone’s conclusions are not new; economists have been modeling these effects for decades.
What is new is the Internet. Never before has such a market existed, and never before has it been so easily to collect data and study social groups. The Internet is unique in several ways. Firstly, there is virtually no cost to starting an online business—there are zero barriers to entry and exit. Secondly, the Internet allows information to flow phenomenally fast, thereby eliminating information asymmetries. Likewise, it distorts geography and time: individuals across the globe can communicate in real-time, and a researcher can access decades-old news articles with a quick Google search. The Internet is a nearly perfectly competitive market. The prices of goods fall to little more than their costs of production and, at first glance, there seems to be little room for profit.
The Internet’s effect is similar to that of the Industrial Revolution. Today, companies centuries old are failing while start-ups are thriving. The Internet era demands new business models. Michael Porter’s cost-leadership strategy is no longer enough; firms will have to differentiate themselves by adding value for their customers. (One way to do this, Daniel Pink suggests, is by focusing on design and those creative, human touches that cannot be replicated by software.)
The Internet also promotes super-monetary economies. With a glut of entertainment options available, a consumer’s scarcest resources are his or her time and attention. When one’s material needs have been mostly satisfied, he moves up Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. People log onto the Internet to participate, to connect with like-minded individuals. They express themselves in art, writing, and video—they will create for free—in exchange only for an audience. Furthermore, as Clay Shirky points out, people will often take on challenging tasks simply in order to master them or to feel autonomous. On the Internet, success is measured not in dollar signs but in reputation, and the primary currency is that of attribution—giving credit where credit is due.
There are several implications for aspiring managers. Daniel Pink argues that Peter Drucker’s “knowledge worker” has been supplanted by the right- and left-brained “conceptual worker.” While this may be more prediction than perception, it is not unrealistic to suggest that tomorrow’s workers will have to communicate as much as they quantify. The physical workplace is less important than the worker himself; tomorrow’s organizations will be decentralized and office hierarchies will be more fluid. Social media will both unite offices and keep them in touch with the outside world. (For a guide to becoming the ultimate mobile warrior, read Timothy Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek; to become a social media expert, read anything by David Meerman Scott.) Finally, in a hyper-connected world, workers will be challenged simply to define their work, to sort out critical information from what is superfluous, and to stay focused. Workers should embrace iterative design theory: “nothing will ever be perfect,” writes David Meerman Scott, suggesting that companies should launch products as soon as possible and revise them later, with user feedback. Managers may need to teach their employees how to work as much as give them orders—a copy of David Allen’s Making It All Work should suffice.
4 Ways the Web is Changing Communications
The web is changing how we organize information in four ways:
Taxonomies (think the Dewey Decimal System or biological classification) used to be necessary to organize information, but the web recognizes that categories are often fluid. Would my hypertext novella be found in the nonfiction, new media, prose or poetry section of a bookstore? The answer is neither and all four—it depends on who is looking for the book. With hyperlinks and tags, the web's architecture is primarily relational.
We rarely enter websites via their splash pages and instead access the page we want via Google, Bing, or another search engine. Even though technology allows news to break faster and memes to spread virally, old information is not so much forgotten as pushed to the fringes. For instance, Google "Ryan Gosling" and three of the top six hits will be images from The Notebook, even though the movie is seven years old and Gosling has starred in a movie every year since (including 2010's Blue Valentine, which won two awards and was nominated for seventeen more). Since old information can be accessed as easily as new, the web is inherently nonlinear.
With a blockbuster movie, a prime-time television show, or even a print book, the dialogue is one-way—from artist to audience. But the web has given consumers a voice and it rewards them for using it. If web content does not facilitate audience participation, surfers will take their attention elsewhere. The web is by nature interactive.
Literary writing is largely absent from the web because designers have not yet found ways to humanistically display longer works. The scroll bar on the side of a browser window actually represents a technological regression (think Egyptian papyrus scrolls). Longer documents, unless intuitively organized, lose all the advantages of print books (the abilities to instantly jump from beginning to end and to see how far you have progressed in the text). Because screen reading can be somewhat uncomfortable, web writing tends to be digestible in shorter chunks (e.g., the length of a blog post).
For my creative writing senior project, I'm writing a prose-poetry hypertext novella—a book-length work organized as a website. My novella tries to takes advantage of the above properties. It's partly an homage to my pre-digital childhood and partly a collage of memories (our present encompasses our past). Think of it as a fictional Wikipedia or a digital choose-your-own-adventure—it's an experiment in nonlinear storytelling.
I'm hoping these guys will publish it.