{"id":271,"date":"2002-03-02T05:35:14","date_gmt":"2002-03-02T12:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2002\/03\/false-dichotomy\/"},"modified":"2002-03-02T05:35:14","modified_gmt":"2002-03-02T12:35:14","slug":"false-dichotomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/03\/02\/false-dichotomy\/","title":{"rendered":"False dichotomy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t&#8212; Macintosh user Virginia Postrel really puts her foot in her mouth in this essay on productivity in the New York Times (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2002\/02\/28\/business\/28SCEN.html\">Lessons in Keeping Business Humming, Courtesy of Wal-Mart U.<\/a>)<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;Surprisingly, the primary source of the productivity gains of 1995 to 1999 was not &#8230; information technology &#8230; though companies accelerated the pace of their I.T. investments during those years,&#8221; reports a summary of the findings published in The McKinsey Quarterly. &#8220;Rather, managerial and technological innovations in only six highly competitive industries &#8212; wholesale trade, retail trade, securities, semiconductors, computer manufacturing and telecommunications &#8212; were the most important causes.&#8221; <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>When academic economists come out with crap like this you wonder if they&#8217;ve ever held a job in the Real World. The industries listed in the McKinsey report Postrel derives this derivative essay from are the most highly info-systems-dependent ones in the entire economy; they are able to make their &#8220;managerial and technological innovations&#8221; because they have networks of computers that feed back vital information about buying trends (&#8220;sell-through&#8221;) to the warehousing, shipping, and purchasing operations that keep the enterprise humming. This is exactly what info systems are about, when they&#8217;re not used for blogging. What a completely idiotic opposition she sets up.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8212; Macintosh user Virginia Postrel really puts her foot in her mouth in this essay on productivity in the New York Times (Lessons in Keeping Business Humming, Courtesy of Wal-Mart U.) &#8220;Surprisingly, the primary source of the productivity gains of 1995 to 1999 was not &#8230; information technology &#8230; though companies accelerated the pace of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2002\/03\/02\/false-dichotomy\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;False dichotomy&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comp"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-4n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}