From ITWeb in South Africa, regarding the state-owned terrestrial broadcast signal distributor and wannabe broadband infrastructure provider, Sentech:

While Sentech has improved its financial performance, the state-owned institution says it is still hobbled by funding constraints, which are keeping it from reaching its full potential.

This is great news. The government has finally discovered that throwing good money after bad is not smart policy. Long may it continue failing to fund inefficient state-owned monopolies, since at full potential they’re a disease that hobbles everyone else.

Yes, there is a connection between Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman who has a book on the market, and sea urchins, who don’t. Some very selective quotation is doing the rounds in the media about Alan Greenspan’s latest book, suggesting that the Iraq war was all about oil. (Here’s a typical version, here’s the outraged hysteria take.)

Greenspan himself refuted such oversimplification, and there’s a good editorial rebuttal here. Among other arguments, it expresses mystification not only that the US never laid claim to any Kuwaiti or Iraqi oil — instead buying it on the open market from the countries in question — but also that the US, despite its supposed oil greed, remains reluctant to exploit its domestic oil reserves, in the name of environmentalism. I largely agree, but would take issue with the last paragraph:

Perhaps those who really think Iraq is about blood for oil can explain just why we would put the lives of young Americans in harm’s way for energy while we safeguard the oil-rich habitats of caribou and sea urchins.

The term “safeguarding” should have read “over-protecting”. There is little evidence that exploiting offshore or Arctic oil reserves would pose a significant danger to either caribou or sea urchins. Environmentalists demand zero cost, and no risk. The environmental cost of exploiting those reserves could be zero — after all, caribou thrive among the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, which is similar to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where environmentalists claim even small-footprint extraction operations would destroy caribou breeding grounds. However, there might indeed be an environmental cost to drilling. We can step lightly, but the only way for humanity to leave no footprints is not to progress at all. Even if there is an environmental cost to be borne, however, there is no evidence at all that the costs cannot be mitigated, and more importantly, that the benefit to US energy security and economic interests would not vastly outweigh them.

Dick Clark has an interesting view on Wikipedia’s philosophical underpinnings and its efficient allocation of resources over at the Mises Institute. It was prompted by a Reason magazine article on Jimmy Wales, its founder, in which he says: “One can’t understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding [libertarian economist F.A.] Hayek.”

Writes Clark:

But how does [Wikipedia’s] polycentric — even anarchic — system, composed of editors acting independently and for their own reasons, result in such an utterly useful resource? The answer goes back to the Hayekian inspiration for the project. Because editors receive both psychological satisfaction and material usefulness from their contributions, the project has grown to include safeguards that help guarantee that the development of the project will move in a positive direction — towards broad, accurate articles that depend on reliable, verifiable sources.

… Wikipedia’s reflection of market dynamics is most easily observed in what many people view as the project’s weakest areas: obscure articles that draw little traffic. In articles about … topics of limited interest, one will often find factual and typographical errors at a much higher rate than in high-traffic articles … . The much higher demand for information about the latter topics means that many more eyes will be combing those much-demanded articles for mistakes.

Since Wikipedia is open to correction by anyone, it stands to reason that the articles attracting more potential editors will be of a higher quality. Rather than a failure, this is a great demonstration of Wikipedia’s efficient allocation of resources. The project, like any other, has a finite amount of productivity to apply to its various activities. It is a positive thing that those articles in greatest demand — those about topics of popular curiosity — would be the ones that are the most complete and reliable.

This explains the usefulness of much of Wikipedia, but doesn’t address the common criticism that Wikipedia cannot be cited as a source of any authority, or even as a source equivalent in authority to, say, Encyclopaedia Britannica. That is to a large extent a red herring, however, since an encyclopaedia is anyway not a citable source in any academic or journalistic work. What is to me a much greater problem with Wikipedia is the fact that it battles to consolidate opposing views on matters of opinion. Its utility declines dramatically, even with popular articles, on subjects such as politics or environmentalism, which are controversial or on which views are strongly polarised. It has a tendency to converge on a populist view on such topics, which isn’t particularly useful.