IEEE Spectrum September, 2008 - 17

books

Lia buLaong

of study. "People gravitating
toward engineering already
have those views," says
Hertog. "Engineering seems
to attract a larger share of
people drawn to rule-bound
systems, compared with other
scientists who primarily work
on open-ended questions and
might be more skeptical."
The paper suggests that the
trend is also driven by professional disenfranchisement.
"The effect of the lack of
opportunities was intensified
by the corrupt, state-driven
job allocation," the researchers
wrote. In other words, Hertog
says, after having earned an
elite degree you're frustrated
having to drive a taxi or sell
vegetables, just because you
lack powerful friends.
Hertog and Gambetta are
planning to expand their
findings into a book covering
the topic in far more detail, with
more anecdotes, background
information, and data from
600 case files recently found by
American forces in a jihadist
hideout in Iraq. It will include
additional survey data on
political and religious attitudes
of engineers in developing
countries and the Muslim world
and locate their findings more
broadly in theories of political
violence, radical behavior, and
cognitive psychology studies
on how personality traits relate
to political attitudes. It will
then link those findings to
studies of how small radical
groups form and consider
why certain individuals are
more likely to be involved.
"Looking back, we never
should have put the paper on the
Web," says Hertog. "It put us on
the map, but not in the way we
wanted to be."
-Susan Karlin
www.spectrum.ieee.org

Here Comes Here
Comes Everybody
clay shirky's new book explains
how the internet makes silly
organizations possible

I

n 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of
the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do
organizations exist? Why don't people
just buy and sell their own services in a
market instead? Coase, who won the 1991
Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the
question by noting a market's transaction
costs: buyers and sellers need to find one
another, then reach agreement, and so on.
The Coase theorem implies that if these
transaction costs are low enough, direct
markets of individuals make a whole lot
of sense. But if they are too high, it makes
more sense to get the job done by an
organization that hires people.
Economists have long understood
the corollary concept of Coase's ceiling,
a point above which organizations
collapse under their own weight-where
hiring someone, however competent,
means more work for everyone
else than the new hire contributes.
Software projects often bump their
heads against Coase's ceiling: recall
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.'s seminal study,
The Mythical Man-Month (AddisonWesley, 1975), which showed how
adding another person onto a project
can slow progress and increase errors.
What's new is something consultant and social technologist Clay Shirky
calls "Coase's Floor," below which we
find projects and activities that aren't
worth their organizational costs-things
so esoteric, so frivolous, so nonsensical,
or just so thoroughly unimportant that
no organization, large or small, would
ever bother with them. Things that
you shake your head at when you see
them and think, "That's ridiculous."

Clay Shirky

Sounds a lot like the Internet,
doesn't it? And that's precisely Shirky's
point. His new book, Here Comes
Everybody: The Power of Organizing
Without Organizations, explores a
world where organizational costs are
close to zero and where ad hoc, loosely
connected groups of unpaid amateurs
can create an encyclopedia larger than
the Britannica and a computer operating
system to challenge Microsoft's.
Shirky teaches at New
York University's Interactive
Telecommunications Program, but
this is no academic book. Sacrificing
rigor for readability, Here Comes
Everybody is an entertaining as well
as informative romp through some
of the Internet's signal moments-
the Howard Dean phenomenon,
Belarusian protests organized on
LiveJournal, the lost cellphone of a
woman named Ivanna, Meetup.com,
flash mobs, Twitter, and more-which
Shirky uses to illustrate his points.
The book is filled with bits of insight
and common sense, explaining why
young people take better advantage of
social tools, how the Internet affects
social change, and how most Internet
discourse falls somewhere between
dinnertime conversation and publishing.
Shirky notes that "most userseptember 2008 * Ieee spectrum * NA

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http://www.Meetup.com http://www.spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2008
