Yesterday, Robert Scoble asked the tech blogosphere's 'thought leaders' to weigh in on this issue of the economy (and included Mashable amongst those he invoked), and today all but declared defeat in his search for expert opinion. The problem, I think, is that he's searching for information in all the wrong places. I too went through the substance withdrawal he's going through now a while back, and documented it here at Mashable.
Lookin' for Expert Love in All The Wrong Places...
The grand take-a-way here is that the philosophical model for Wisdom of the Crowds breaks down very easily when it's subjected to, as James Surowiecki put it, a crowd that is too homogeneous, too centralized, too divided, too imitative, or too emotional. In the case of FriendFeed and Twitter (where Scoble is primarily searching), the crowd fits three of those failure criteria: homogeneous, imitative and emotional.
The tech blogosphere is just that: a homogeneous group of thinkers, coders, executives and writers who on microformat social media platforms imitate each other in a state of emotional pandemonium. This isn't a slam - it's hard not to be emotional when faced with the prospect of economic obliteration (and I for one enjoy the many daily imitative memes started by various members of the community).
The problem is that we're all very clearly divorced from normal circumstances, and the vast majority are all trying to get a handle on topics and lingo that we'd have a hard time understanding in the best of circumstances. I've probably been researching the whole economic fiasco more than most, and while I pride myself on understanding macroeconomics better than the average bear, my head is swimming as badly as those who just get the cable news drive-by explanation.
So How do We Make Sense of This?
This is a situation where the standard Internet research techniques don't really apply. Wikipedia doesn't really cover breaking news that well, and most of the experts in this game have a chip in this game. Thus, it's hard to find an idea or interpretation of the situation that's balanced and reasonable, let alone completely unbiased.
To try and circumvent the punditry and get to a set of opinions I could easily decipher, I started reading the opinions from the various think tanks, including the Heritage Institute, the CATO Institute and the Club for Growth. They all had varying ideas about the passage of the bailout bill (and whether it was the best thing for the country), which in and of itself is no different than asking the various financial publications, politicians and Wall Street pundits.
The difference here from what you might get from most mainstream, microblogging or even many standard blogging sources is that the think tanks are organizations that I'm familiar with in terms of their guiding principals, and thus I can know and surmise the underlying reasons they make the recommendations they make. I can't say the same about every politician or Wall Street pundit. They all have biases tied to their jobs, their staffers and all sorts of unknowns that to track down turns into a rabbit hunt. This makes an already complicated task of finding out what's going on nigh-impossible.
Here's What I Found Out
That's why today I decided to go ahead and consult some folks whose job it is to follow these sorts of things. Back in March, I served on a panel on online privacy with a resident scholar for the CATO Institute by the name of Jim Harper. I gave him a ring and invited him on the program to help put this all in laymens terms.
One thing in particular that he said which puts these thoughts in perspective is that a lot of the media is centered in New York City, so the spin we see is heavily colored by the investment bank failure - which is very real, and not by Main Street banks, which as of now seem to be dealing with the crisis in stride. Because the New York City news desks only see what is around them, the calm and unemotional perspective is considerably lacking from most of the coverage.
In our discussion, though, we tried to stay away from casting blame. It's not important which party or individuals created this mess. The circumstances that created it are important, because they need to be addressed to prevent a repeat performance. More important for our collective future is how we weather the storm and what immediate steps are needed to prevent a widespread disaster of catastrophic proportions.
If you want the audio track to our discussion, feel free to subscribe to our audio podcast feed, or come back tomorrow morning and watch the video. In the mean time, I encourage you to not take the pundits words at face value (not even my own).