On game design, Bill Gates on Covid, the effects of colonial land tenure in India, the abuse of labor, and on innovation
Interesting Links: August 9, 2020
“The secret to good game design is simple. Set up situations where there is a problem that must be solved and let the user solve it. Set up situations where there is a problem that must be solved and let the user solve it. Give them subtle clues, but don’t take away that ‘aha’ moment.
Daniel Cook, The Princess Rescuing Application
- Crazy good slides on using the best of game design to make better applications.
- Back in 2014, Patrick Collison had tweeted about this as “the most influential thing” he had read on the subject of product design, and Daniel Gross recently replied to the tweet with an archive.org link.
- The sad thing is that he wrote this back in 2008, yet most applications today make the same mistakes he points out.
- The exciting thing is the massive opportunities that still exist in how we design our digital products.
- Bill Gates on Covid interviewed by the fantastic Steven Levy for Wired.
- He is optimistic for the future. But in case there was any question about what ‘optimism’ means here: “…for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022.” So for us poor souls in India, 0.45 years down, 2.5 more years to go. Woo hoo!
- Another pdf - old, but a good one: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India by Abhijig Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer in 2004.
- Basically, they look at regions where the British set up landlord systems (i.e., zamindars) to collect land revenue vs. regions where such intermediation did not exist, and find that the areas with landlord systems performed quite poorly for a long period of time after that.
- This won’t be surprising to anyone familiar with India, once you see the demarcation:
- Regions with a large landlord/zamindar presence (%s in parentheses): Bihar (100%), West Bengal (100%), Rajasthan (100%), Madhya Pradesh (90%), Orissa (68%), Uttar Pradesh (58%).
- Regions with a much lower landlord/zamindar presence (%s in parentheses): Gujarat (0%), Karnataka (0%), Punjab (13%), Haryana (15%), Maharashtra (22%), Tamil Nadu (25%), Andhra Pradesh (34%).
- Talk on Monopsony from American Slavery to Amazon Mechanical Turk by Suresh Naidu at Columbia. And also take a look at slides related to this topic by him. And see the paper on American slavery and labour market power. The paper is behind a paywall.
- “In this short essay I want to make one, not terribly original, point: giving workers the absolute right to quit their jobs is technically inefficient in an otherwise highly commodified economy. When workers can quit, concerns about recruitment, retention, and incentives give employers both the room and the reason to set wages below marginal products, and the resulting distortions imply that turnover and unemployment are both higher than the competitive, market-clearing level.”
- “The free worker wage must be higher than a worker’s outside option, so that the threat of firing is credible, but below the free marginal product because it is profitable to endure higher turnover in exchange for a lower wage. The free labour market will therefore rarely obey the ‘law of one price’, and wage dispersion and worker misallocation will be rampant.”
- Naval interviews Matt Ridley (part 1, part 2) on his new book, How Innovation Works.
- Naval summarizing Ridley - On innovation: “This also helps explain why it tends to be geographically concentrated. If it was a breakthrough by lone individuals, you would expect innovation to be highly geographically distributed. But it tends to be very geographically concentrated where you’re surrounded by other inventors, tinkerers and thinkers, because you’re always building on little bits and pieces.”