ENDPAPER
Best Ideas of a Decade
Published: December 17, 2010
The editors asked Tyler Cowen, the economist who helps run the blog Marginal Revolution, to read the previous nine Ideas issues and send us his thoughts on which entries, with the benefit of hindsight, struck him as noteworthy. Do any ideas from this year’s issue look promising? “I recall reading the 2001 issue when it came out,” he says. “And I was hardly bowled over with excitement by thoughts of ‘Populist Editing.’ Now I use Wikipedia almost every day. The 2001 issue noted that, in its selection of items, ‘frivolous ideas are given the same prominence as weighty ones’; that is easiest to do when we still don’t know which are which.”
THE BEST IDEA OF EACH YEAR
2001: “Populist Editing.” Wikipedia has since eclipsed the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta project, and many of us use it almost every day.
2001: “Populist Editing.” Wikipedia has since eclipsed the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta project, and many of us use it almost every day.
2002: “Early-Detection Revisionism.” We often find extra medical treatment hard toturn down, yet frequently it does us little good or even harm, so sometimes it’s better not to know your condition at all. Prostatecancer is one area in which this idea is having an impact.
2003: “Social Networks.” The New York Times has a Facebook page, a Facebook application and a New York Times News Quiz on Facebook; then there are Facebook’s 500 million users.
2004: “Dumb Robots Are Better.” The days of the Jetsons, and housecleaning robots, are not upon us, so settle for less. Be happy if your robot does anything useful at all.
2005: “Touch Screens That Touch Back.” This pick was ahead of its time, as few people realized that this technology, as seen in the2002 Steven Spielberg movie “Minority Report,” would show up so quickly in the iPhone and the iPad.
2003: “Social Networks.” The New York Times has a Facebook page, a Facebook application and a New York Times News Quiz on Facebook; then there are Facebook’s 500 million users.
2004: “Dumb Robots Are Better.” The days of the Jetsons, and housecleaning robots, are not upon us, so settle for less. Be happy if your robot does anything useful at all.
2005: “Touch Screens That Touch Back.” This pick was ahead of its time, as few people realized that this technology, as seen in the2002 Steven Spielberg movie “Minority Report,” would show up so quickly in the iPhone and the iPad.
2006: “Walk-In Health Care.” We’ll need more of this, as general practitioners are harder to see and emergency-room waits get longer.
2007: “The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid.” Send satellites with mirrors to reflect the sun, vaporizing one spot on the asteroid, releasing gases and changing its course. If this ever comes in handy, it will be the biggest idea of them all.
2008: “Carbon Penance.” “ . . . a translucent leg band . . . keeps track of your electricity consumption. When it detects, via aspecial power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns intothe flesh of your leg.” Satire is an idea, too. The slightly more practical anti-global-warming idea from 2008 was to eat kangaroos,since they, unlike cows, do not produce methane gas.
2007: “The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid.” Send satellites with mirrors to reflect the sun, vaporizing one spot on the asteroid, releasing gases and changing its course. If this ever comes in handy, it will be the biggest idea of them all.
2008: “Carbon Penance.” “ . . . a translucent leg band . . . keeps track of your electricity consumption. When it detects, via aspecial power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns intothe flesh of your leg.” Satire is an idea, too. The slightly more practical anti-global-warming idea from 2008 was to eat kangaroos,since they, unlike cows, do not produce methane gas.
2009: “Music for Monkeys.” We still don’t know which of the ideas from last year will pay off, but the idea of generating music that monkeys enjoy (and humans don’t) was the most fun of the bunch.
THE MOST PRESCIENT PICKS
2001: “Populist Editing” Wikipedia started in January 2001, and the magazine was quick to call its success. By 2007 (“Wikiscanning”), the magazine was writing about Congressional staff members who were editing Wiki pages for the benefit of their bosses.
2001: “Populist Editing” Wikipedia started in January 2001, and the magazine was quick to call its success. By 2007 (“Wikiscanning”), the magazine was writing about Congressional staff members who were editing Wiki pages for the benefit of their bosses.
2001: “The Game That Plays You” The idea of a collectively created fictional world, built out of thousands of interlinked Web pages, is standard for World of Warcraft fans, but it was not well known at the time.
2002: “S.S.R.I.’s as Performance Enhancers” Think of beta blockers for musicians or anti-social-anxiety drugs for athletes. Millions use them, and they probably lie behind a lot of today’s top performances. This story is still being written, but the evidence favors their effectiveness, and the drugs will only get better.
2002: “Early Detection Revisionism” Excess mammograms, overly zealous prostate treatments and too much back surgery still get press today, as the evidence continues to accumulate that some medical issues are better left alone than overtreated.
2004: “The Drug-Trial Registry” All clinical results from drug trials should be posted online for public inspection, and indeed the world has moved a long way in this direction.
BEST UNDERSTATEMENT
2005: “The Global Savings Glut” “Should the day of reckoning arrive, the task of mitigating the pain is going to fall mainly on Bernanke’s shoulders.” That’s the last sentence of the article, about the United States’ current account deficit.
2005: “The Global Savings Glut” “Should the day of reckoning arrive, the task of mitigating the pain is going to fall mainly on Bernanke’s shoulders.” That’s the last sentence of the article, about the United States’ current account deficit.
OVERSOLD
2005: “The Laptop That Will Save the World” Predicting that a $100 laptop would help solve worldwide poverty wasn’t so prescient. The bettercall from 2005 was “Touch Screens That Touch Back”: screens that offer a sensory response when you run your finger along them, asis now the case with the iPad and other such devices.
2005: “The Laptop That Will Save the World” Predicting that a $100 laptop would help solve worldwide poverty wasn’t so prescient. The bettercall from 2005 was “Touch Screens That Touch Back”: screens that offer a sensory response when you run your finger along them, asis now the case with the iPad and other such devices.
A FEW IDEAS WE COULD USE MORE OF
2003: “Futures Markets in Everything” Intrade.com is the first place to go on election night for the results; it’s way ahead of the evening news. But how about conditional futures markets, like comparing the price of “2014 G.D.P. if a Republican wins” versus “2014 G.D.P. if Obama is re-elected”? That would show us which candidate the markets thought was better for the economy.
2003: “Futures Markets in Everything” Intrade.com is the first place to go on election night for the results; it’s way ahead of the evening news. But how about conditional futures markets, like comparing the price of “2014 G.D.P. if a Republican wins” versus “2014 G.D.P. if Obama is re-elected”? That would show us which candidate the markets thought was better for the economy.
2004: “The Television Blaster” You point it at a loud TV in public, and it shuts the thing down.
2006: “Walk-in Health Care” It is time to consider bringing more of the retail efficiencies of Wal-Mart to our health care sector.
THE BEST ONE-SENTENCE OBSERVATION
“They” — our thumbs — “have suddenly become our most important digit.” That’s from 2003’s “Text Messager’s Thumb,” about the physical toll of text messaging.
“They” — our thumbs — “have suddenly become our most important digit.” That’s from 2003’s “Text Messager’s Thumb,” about the physical toll of text messaging.
THE MOST ‘OFF’ PICKS
2001: “The ‘X-Files’ Conspiracy Trope is Dead” Conspiracy theories seemed in decline, yet now so-called birthers are common, and as of August nearly 20 percent of the U.S. citizenry were willing to claim that Barack Obama was a Muslim, secretly or otherwise.
2001: “The ‘X-Files’ Conspiracy Trope is Dead” Conspiracy theories seemed in decline, yet now so-called birthers are common, and as of August nearly 20 percent of the U.S. citizenry were willing to claim that Barack Obama was a Muslim, secretly or otherwise.
2001: “American Imperialism, Embraced” American imperialism has hardly remained fashionable, given the widespread skepticism about Iraq and Afghanistan and demands for fiscal austerity.
2005: Can Work Only Once? “Forehead Billboards” A 21-year-old named Andrew Fischer auctioned off the space on his forehead for $37,375 on eBay, thereafter attaching a small temporary tattoo advertising an over-the-counter sleep remedy. The company, SnoreStop, calculates that it received nearly $1 million worth of publicity. And a woman named Kari Smith leased her forehead for a permanent tattooed ad for the online gambling and entertainment venture GoldenPalace.com.
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