Author: Curt Doolittle

March 15th, 2011

Ok, so before I get started here, let me avoid a little criticism right from the start. I’m not a typical agency guy. While I’m the CEO of a fairly large agency, I’ve also been founder, CEO or a principle at companies in a variety of fields from technology to law. And in each field we humans see the world through different lenses. I have a lens too. And fundamentally, I’m a political economist.

A political economist is a certain kind of geek. It means I think in terms of society, incentives, habits, beliefs, institutions and organization, as well as money and all that money entails. And it also means that i’m not politically correct, or even very tempered in my observations.

That’s not my job. Something is either true or not, and useful or not. Whether people like it or not isn’t something I worry too much about. There are plenty of people who can do that. THere aren’t that many of us that predict trends.

Furthermore, on top of being a little controversial, I’m a contrarian. That term has a technical meaning. It means that I look for the point at which fashions and trends ‘fail’, or ‘top out’, and the consequences of those trends and their failures.

Lastly, the division of knowledge and labor in the world is also divided into time periods. So some people think in short term, some medium term, and some long term, and people like me look at the very long term, and I try to understand how organizations react to changes in society.

So, I see the world through those lenses. And through those lenses I try to find patters that will inform us and our clients about the likely course of events, or the reason some events occurred. In other words, my job is trends.

And it turns out, whether by luck or skill, I”m pretty good at trends. That puts me at odds with most marketers. In fact, you would be surprised how many of my postings the board of directors asks me to take down. It’s one of the reasons I don’t write on this industry very often. It’s because I’m largely a critic of it. I’m a critic of it because I understand that marketing is a social science and companies, people’s livelihoods, as well as our national competitiveness are significantly impacted by whether we are good at marketing or not.

So, my job is to be right on long term trends.

http://www.puretheoryofmarketing.com/

http://mitnse.com/Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors – MIT’s Oehmen

Arriving in Atlanta after a week in New York is like entering a sensory deprivation chamber.

http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.101.1.1The Top 20 Articles Of The Past 100 Years from American Economic Review. http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.101.1.1

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/living/not-as-old-as-you-thinkYoga is a modern invention, and largely American, or at least western rationalist in origin. Not one of my areas of interest, other than the pervasive distribution of thought around the world, and the merging of different bits of it from here and there.

I argue that anarchic propertarianism is a brilliant and fruitful research program. But it is, as currently envisioned, another luddite fantasy rather than an institutional solution to modernity that can compete with democratic secular humanism and irrational financial probabilism. Until we unite Austrianism with New Institutional Economics with modern technology we will not have a rational pragmatic alternative that preserves freedom.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of NPR. I’m a listener, albiet not a frequent one. On the other hand, using taxpayer money for purposes that are political in nature, content, or value judgements which other taxpayers find patently offensive is simply intolerable. We will not have a government that we can all support unless it does very little, and what little it does, is acceptable to everyone. NPR appeals to people who are educated but who largely do not participate in the market, or are wealthy enough not to need to participate in the market. It is an 11% demographic, and that 11% is decidedly left of center, because our universities are decidedly left of center. And for that reason, the use of public funds to promote the religion of secular humanism is simply offensive to other people. NPR is The 700 Club for Democratic Secular Humanism. It belongs in the private sector.

NPR Board Member Admits It Serves ‘Liberal, Highly Educated Elite,’ Wonders How to Justify Public Funding http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/lachlan-markay/2011/03/11/npr-board-member-admits-it-serves-liberal-highly-educated-elite-wond

http://www.capitalismv3.com/?p=2421Equal opportunity criticism.

Happy Birthday:)

http://freudslastsession.com/Short Play. Priceless. Very well acted. I kept thinking that adding the characters of Nietzsche and Tolkien would have really made for an interesting evening. I’d side with Nietzsche and Tolkien over Lewis and Freud any day. 🙂

Wanted to catch the version of Macbeth that’s scheduled but it hasn’t started yet.