How To Live Forever - credits James Altucher

How To Live Forever

• Posted by James Altucher
 
• on November 18th, 2010

Lets say you knew that on December 15, 2020, you were going to die in Springfield, Illinois. What would you do? Well, for starters you would probably prolong your life simply by avoiding Springfield, Illinois on December 15, 2020. It just so happens we can use statistics to see the future, and by doing so, can postpone death as long as possible.

I’m sick of the anti-aging industry. Basically, nothing fancy works. Dr. Oz recommends reservatrol but scientific studies only show that enormous amounts of it are what expands the lifespan of a mouse. There’s no way to take an equivalent amount as a human. Anti-aging expert Andrew Weil often suggests herbal remedies instead of pharmaceutical medicines but I think, again, the research is very unclear and it’s no secret that lifespans have gone up in general with the rise of more readily available, FDA-approved pharmaceuticals. There’s always a lot of discussion of homeopathic medicine but, again, the evidence is lacking.

My view is to take a very common sense view towards aging. By the way, I have never thought about anti-aging techniques before. But I’m 42-years-old now, and probably past the half-point of my life, so I’ve started to wonder about it. Common sense has served me well in most other areas of my life. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, puts it succinctly with “Do no harm” in his hippocratic oath. There’s a similar rule in the area of financial advice which I think applies here as well. It’s actually two rules, stated by Warren Buffett, the greatest investor ever: “Rule No. 1: Don’t Lose Money. Rule No. 2: Don’t Forget Rule #1.”

The Warren Buffett approach is appealing. Think about it from a financial perspective. Most of the reasons people go broke is not because they failed to make money but because they spent their hard-earned money on bad investments that went to zero. In other words, they broke Buffett’s rules. Much more important than figuring out how to add dollars to your net worth is how to avoid losing the dollars you’ve already accumulated. Applied to the anti-aging industry — don’t spend so much time figuring out how to add years to your lifespan. How about use common sense to make sure you don’t make additional decisions that cost you your health.

We know what the main killers are in life (this comes from the Centers for Disease Control, U.S. Government, data):

Top 10 Killers

Heart disease: 616,067
Cancer: 562,875
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 135,952
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 127,924
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 123,706
Alzheimer’s disease: 74,632
Diabetes: 71,382
Influenza and Pneumonia: 52,717
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 46,448
Septicemia: 34,828

So lets start by avoiding some of these diseases.

1. No Smoking. You only have to go to the American Heart Organization website to see their research on how smoking is related to heart disease.  A quote: “Smoking increases blood pressure, decreases exercise tolerance and increases the tendency for blood to clot. Smoking also increases the risk of recurrent coronary heart disease after bypass surgery.” That doesn’t sound good. There’s also numerous studies on the effects of smoking on cancer. Go to cancer.gov. Here’s a  quote: “Of the 250 known harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke, more than 50 have been found to cause cancer. These chemicals include:
arsenic (a heavy metal toxin)
benzene (a chemical found in gasoline)
beryllium (a toxic metal)
cadmium (a metal used in batteries)
chromium (a metallic element)
ethylene oxide (a chemical used to sterilize medical devices)
nickel (a metallic element)
polonium-210 (a chemical element that gives off radiation)
vinyl chloride (a toxic substance used in plastics manufacture)”

That’s pretty bad. I just have to read the first: “arsenic.” Who wants to put arsenic in their body? Don’t forget rule #1!

(smoker's lung on the left side of the image)

2. No Heavy Drinking. Note that I say “heavy” drinking and not drinking in general. In fact, many studies show that moderate drinking reduces the risk of heart attacks by up to 40 percent. Go to this link: http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/HealthIssues/1109728149.html .It has a list of studies that show the types of cancers that moderate drinking actually help prevent. What is moderate versus heavy drinking? At cdc.goc, “drinking in moderation is defined as having no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men.”

Heavy drinking, on the other hand, is lethal. Obviously, it increases your risk of having a fatal accident, but there’s numerous studies showing that heavy drinking is linked to various cancers, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. Here’s a quote from Alzinfo.org: “In the study, researchers found that the combination of heavy drinking and heavy smoking sped up the age of onset of Alzheimer’s by six to seven years. That is a considerable number, making them among the most important preventable risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease.” Oh yeah, there’s that smoking thing again.

On heartdisease.about.com: “After their heart attacks, patients who had done any binge drinking during the previous year had a death rate that was 73 percent higher than patients who did not do any binge drinking. Even occasional binge drinking (as they defined that term in this study) increased the risk of death.” Binge drinking they define as having three or more beers in a day.

From the American Cancer Society: “Death from liver cancer is higher among heavy alcohol users than among people who do not drink.”

So it’s pretty simple. You can avoid accidents, heart disease and a bunch of cancers if you never drink more than two beers a day.

3. Sex. It doesn’t have to be all puritan. Maybe you like to smoke and drink a lot and now you’re pretty upset. How about taking up a more fun activity during the day, like sex. Here’s an article by Jonah Lehrer: “Sex is stressful but good for you.” (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/sex-is-stressful-but-good-for-you/)  Basically it shows that sex activates various hormones that increases your immune system, decreases your stress levels, reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s and all sorts of other good things. And it’s pretty much common sense that this is a good thing. Heck, the Bible recommends we do a lot of it.

There’s an article from WebMd on the 10 health benefits of sex. (http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/features/10-surprising-health-benefits-of-sex?page=2) One quote: “The researchers also found that having sex twice or more a week reduced the risk of fatal heart attack by half for the men, compared with those who had sex less than once a month.”

4. No snacking. Obesity is linked to high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, certain types of cancer, etc. There’s no shame in being obese. Over one-third of adult Americans are obese according to the Centers for Disease Control. And being overweight and enjoying food are not crimes. But if you stick to the basics you’ll avoid (reduce) being obese. Ugh, I’m really hungry right this second as I’m writing this. Since last year whenever the  market’s gone down I’ve felt an irresistible urge to eat. I’ll eat an apricot Danish, or a corn muffin, or a hot dog, Pringles, Doritos, or anything with Cajun spices. If you have some corned beef hash when I’m in this state, please send it over. I’ll eat all of it. I’m like a shovel working on Obama’s trillion dollars worth of road repairs, I’ll shove it all in.

This is not a healthy lifestyle and now that I’m about to breach  the age of 42 I have to think about my metabolism and how its beginning to weaken.  This happened to me once before, towards the tail end of the bear market of 2002. My entire life I’ve weighed my college weight except for that one time in 2002 when  I gained about 20 lbs. I read through all the diet books and nutrition sites but none of them made sense to me. So I came up with my own diet and it worked. What follows is the “James Altucher White Book Diet” as seen on Oprah, The View, the Today Show, Obama’s Inaugural speech, and other top Nielsen rated TV shows [note from ed.  Unable to verify] . It took me about two months to lose the 20 pounds once I started using this plan

1. No sodas. Ever. One can of coke contains 16 sugars. That’s just mindless calories.
2. No snacks between meals. Have a breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And that’s it.
3. No white at night. Meaning, no pasta, no ice cream, no cheese, no bread. Nothing white at night. Enjoy a steak and some asparagus.
4. One item for breakfast. Knock yourself out if you want a croissant. Or a bagel with cream cheese. Or a fruit cup. Or one Belgian waffle. But stick to only one item.

Do whatever you want for lunch. Doesn’t matter as long as you stick to the other rules above. And if you are also avoiding the heavy drinking then your calories will stay down and your weight might go down.

5. Exercise. I know, everyone says this. I don’t want to be boring so we’ll keep this simple and stick to the minimal basics. First off, its obvious that exercise and being in shape has health benefits. From the Mayo Clinic, there’s an article on the benefits of exercise. (http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/exercise/HQ01676) A quote: “Regular physical activity can help you prevent — or manage — high blood pressure. Your cholesterol will benefit, too. Regular physical activity boosts high-density lipoprotein (HDL), or good cholesterol while decreasing triglycerides. This one-two punch keeps your blood flowing smoothly by lowering the buildup of plaques in your arteries.”

And there’s more. “Regular physical activity can help you prevent type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis and certain types of cancer.”

BAM! We avoid the two top killers and probably a bunch more.

If you are already an exercise fanatic, then this section isn’t for you. But if you are not really that into exercise or you get bored with it then we need to figure out how to trick your mind and body into getting motivated to exercise. Minimally, you want to do a half hour of exercise a day but that can be spread out. Some ideas:

1. Can you wake up 10 minutes earlier and do 30 push ups and 30 sit ups? If all you did was 100 push ups a day, spread out throughout the day (do 30 more during a commercial break, for instance), you’re going to get in good shape and build muscle.
2. Can you take the stairs instead of an escalator whenever you get the chance?
3. Can you park a little further from work and walk a half mile instead of parking right at the door?
4. Take a tango lesson once a week or ballroom dancing. Or play a couple of games of tennis or even ping pong. Anything that can get you to sweat a little bit.
5. Find a basketball court and just try to shoot 10 baskets. Just the jumping and shooting is decent exercise for 10 minutes and might be fun.
6. Get someone to show you two to four yoga poses. Do them every day.

The key is just to get the body moving in a way that’s new and a little more difficult than its usual movements (sitting down, sleeping and eating). And if you’re really motivated and just want to get through a half hour of solid exercise, just do 100 push ups, 100 sit ups, and 100 squats in a half hour period. Do it three times a week and you’re set for life.

7.Sleep a lot. Sleeping is great. For one thing, when you sleep, you probably won’t have a fatal accident. Nor will you be eating while you sleep. Or drinking heavily or smoking, or any of the other activities that can cause an inconveniently timed death. In fact, lack of sleep (meaning six hours or less on average) is linked to colon cancer, weight gain, strokes, heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression. Don’t we all like to sleep a little more? Certainly sleeping an extra hour a day has got to be a lot easier than exercising an hour a day.

So how much sleep do you need? Seven to eight hours a night. More than that is not even necessarily healthy. Statistics show that people who regularly sleep eight hours a night, no more and no less, live the longest.

I have insomnia. I’ve also been day trading for a living, on and off, for the past ten years. I’ve traded my own money and others. It’s an unpleasant way to live. The highs are very high and the lows are very low and painful. Whether you are at the highs or the lows you’re probably going to experience insomnia along with 32 million other people in this country that have insomnia.

When I have insomnia here is the form it takes: I have no problem falling asleep. But then at about 2 or 3am, I am awake and can’t get back to sleep. The worst is when I finally get back to sleep around 5:30 but by then I’m in trouble: I’ll wake up around 6:30 or 7 completely exhausted for the day.

This is no good for a day trader. You need to be focused, on your game, and not make mistakes which cost you your livelihood because you are simply too tired to be sharp. Imagine if you take out $5,000 and just drop it on the street and walk away. You would be stupid if you did that. It’s also stupid to let insomnia force you into mistakes that cost you many multiples more than $5,000.

Some of the suggestions below may seem harsh. And the correct solution for insomnia will be different for everyone. But if you do follow the suggestions below, I can safely say it’s unlikely you will have insomnia.

1. - No computer for the last hour of the day. Not only that, turn off the computer. There should be no computer sound or monitor light. The sound and light keeps you sucked into the virtual reality of the day trading world, where you live and die on every tick in the markets. You need to disengage from that world and enter back into the real world in order to sleep.
2. - No food after 7pm. I really meant to write 5pm but that might be unrealistic for most people. Sleep and digestion are closely linked. Studies show that many people with insomnia have either irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or sensitive stomachs. Not eating past 5pm and drinking more liquids throughout the day can help you be cleaned out for your sleep. You want to eat easy-to-digest foods at night. No meat, not too much sugar. Vegetables and fruits.
3. - No alcohol. The sugar will pop you awake in the middle of the night.
4. - Exercise. This is directly related to what happens to your body when you day trade. Imagine if you were mugged. Adrenalin and stress hormones would get released in your body and you’d either fight or flight. Fighting or running would work off those stress hormones. When you day trade, it’s as if you are getting mugged all day long — but you are just sitting there. You aren’t working off the stress hormones. Those chemicals will keep you awake at night. Exercise (if done early in the day) will at first increase the stress hormones but then over the next few hours after exercise finishes, will work those hormones off.
5. - Clean your bedroom, your closet, your office, your kitchen, etc. Your mind and your living space need to be friends with each other. Clean mind equals clean living space. Cluttered space means cluttered mind. Cluttered mind leads to anxiety, nervousness, stress, and then those stress hormones are waking you up again in the middle of the night. Power down the computer and clean your room before you go to sleep.
6. - Put closure on the end of your work day. Make a list of the work related things you did that day. Write them down on a pad. Trades you made, articles you read that you remember, ideas you had, calls you made related to business. I write everything into an email I send to myself. It helps me to see how productive I was (or not), particularly on days that might not have been that good otherwise (i.e. if I lost money trading that day). It also helps me understand and analyze my trades a bit more. And finally, when I hit “send” on that email to myself, my day is over. Onwards to the next thing (talking to family, friends, etc).
7. - Meditate. You don’t need to get in the lotus position and start chanting for an hour or two. Most of the time during the day, particularly when you’re stressed, you may stop and notice that your breaths are short and uneven. Sit in a chair for ten minutes, with the lights out or on dim. Simply watch your breath. Don’t breathe too deeply but as deeply as is natural. Count the breaths to ten. Then start over. If you find you are losing your place too much (or slipping into “11..12..”) then just count to five and start over. Do that for just ten minutes in the evening. Ideally, do it in the morning also before you begin your day.
8. - Early to bed, early to rise. Ben Franklin is right. This will make you wealthy (maybe wise also but we’re focused on trading here). 5am is a good time to wake up, read the news, check futures, and plan your trades for the day. That gives you a little over 4 hours to get ready for the trading day. If you need 8 hours of sleep then backtrack from 5am to see when you need to get to sleep.
9. If you follow these guidelines you will be on your A game when you trade, you will sleep better, and you will wake up each morning refreshed and ready to go.

7. Regular Flow. You know what I mean: constipation is bad. Imagine keeping all that horrible bacteria in your body one more second than you have to. Get it out! What happens is that fecal matter builds up in your colon, causing an unvirtuous cycle: the more fecal matter that builds up, blocking the openings of the colon, the more fecal matter gets stuck up there, putrefying for years, leading to everything from colon cancer to a breakdown of the immune system: more flus, allergies, heart disease, etc. The key of all of this article is how to very simply avoid the leading causes of death. Keeping the inside of your body clean is the simplest. Going to the bathroom more than three times a week is key. Everyone varies in this but ideally, at least once a day is enough to keep the factory working.

How to avoid constipation:

1. Use it or lose it. When you have to go … GO!
2. High fiber diet: fruits, vegetables, high fiber cereals (Dr. John Harvey Kellog, the founder of Kellog’s cereal, invented his high-bran, high fiber cereal for just this purpose).
3. Lots of liquids
4. Avoid eating too much low-fiber foods. Obviously we all like our ice cream. But too march starch and sugar could be bad, particularly if you are currently suffering.

8. Feel Gratitude. Stress effects every aspect of your physical health and can cause every single one of the causes of death mentioned above. Every technique described above indirectly reduces stress. But dealing with stress also involves building your mental muscles. Mental muscles are like physical ones — they atrophy. If you are bedridden for a few months then you would have to engage in intense physical rehab in order to even walk because your muscles would’ve atrophied that severely and quickly.

Its the same with mental muscles. The muscle that prevents stress needs to be regularly exercised or you will succumb to the excesses of too much stress in your life and you won’t be able to climb out of the hole. Believe me, I know this. At different times in my life I’ve made and lost millions. Part of what I do is I daytrade for a living. While there are many stressful jobs out there, daytrading has to be among the top 10. When I’m in a big position and it starts moving against me I feel every heartbeat in my body pushing the blood all around. The stress permeates me and part of the daily routine of a daytrader is learning to deal with the stress.

Think of the human body when its mugged, or when a car is bearing down on it. The human body signals a flight or fight response. Your adrenalin pumps through and its almost as if you have superhuman powers as you either run the fastest you’ve ever run, or you jump out of the way of a car or, god hoping, you block a car from running over your baby, as has happened in extreme examples. In other words, in a normal response to stress you feel the stress, your body produces the adrenalin and hormones to deal with it, and you react, quickly working off the stress.

But the normal daily grind that causes our stress almost never gets worked off. Its as if you are mugged all day long. And that leads to only bad things in the body (see all 10 killers above).

There are many ways to avoid stress but the one I’m focusing on in this technique is to exercise your gratitude muscle. Try it for just five minutes a day. List all of the things you are grateful for. Don’t think about anything else. You don’t need to meditate with the Dalai lama to reduce stress. All you have to do is for five minutes a day think about the things you are grateful for. Your kids. Your friends. The walk you took yesterday. The smile a stranger through your way this morning.

Once the muscle is exercised, then get it working again during the moments you feel stressed. If you are feeling stress about a family relationship, think about a time when that relationship was great in your life. If you are feeling stressed about money, remember that all things cycle and whatever you have this second is still enough for you to enjoy life. I know it sounds corny. But if you do that five minutes a day I can guarantee that you’ll be surprised at the new muscles you find.

9. Mental exercises. Nobody knows for sure how every detail of the brain works. But we do have a basic model. The brain has 100mm neurons, give or take, that communicate via synapses. When you learn something new, a bunch of neurons and their synapses fire up with traffic. The more traffic between neurons, the more their synapses strengthen. Like in the Gratitude section above, if we keep on strengthening the synapses between neurons all across the brain then we build up resistance to any illnesses that effect the brain, such as Alzheimer’s, the #6 killer above. Additionally, there are other benefits to keeping sharp: higher income, perhaps less stress, hopefully an ability to avoid accidents (like balancing your checkbook incorrectly), etc.

Some mental exercises you can do daily to keep sharp:

1. Play memory games. Exercise your memory
2. Get a book of brain teasers and puzzles and solve them.
3. Play chess, checkers, poker, any game that requires some strategic thought and memorization.
4. After meeting a person, try to remember everything he or she wore and said.
5. Try to eat lefty every once in awhile (or right-handed if you are left-handed).
6. Right now try to figure out what coins are in your pocket just by touch. Now do the same for bills (100 dollar bills are less worn than ones)
7. Play boggle or any other game which takes a set of letters and you try to see how many new words you can form from it.

Like physical exercise, if you do mental exercises for 20-30 minutes a day for five days a week you’ll see dramatic results in a very short time.

10. Avoid hospitals.

Something like 40,000 people die each year from infections they get in the hospital according the CDC. Essentially, hospitals are filled with bacteria and hospital staff (not in every hospital, but some) routinely ignore the basic steps required to insure that people do not pass infections to others.

1. Make sure anyone who touches you washes your hands first.
2. Don’t read the magazines (or, if you are a kid, play with the toys) in the waiting lounges at hospitals or doctor’s rooms.
3. Have an advocate with you preferably at all times.

A quick story: I was once pretending to be a respiratory therapist for a week in a hospital (long story) and I got to walk around with doctors, other respiratory therapists, etc on their routines. It wasn’t uncommon to hear a story such as “such and such nurse took the tracheotomy tube out but forgot to plug it up and the patient suffocated.” Again, not every hospital is like this but mistakes are made. There are millions of surgical procedures a year. Some complicated and some simple and all it takes is a tiny percentage of those to go wrong and the number of deaths from surgery accidents will far exceed the number of deaths from plane crashes each year. “The number of adverse events each year (is) equivalent to 13 jumbo jets crashing and killing all 350 passengers on board,” Kevin Rudd’s Australian National Health and Hospital Reform Commission says. An advocate every step of the way can insure that proper procedures are being followed.

1. Question all surgeries. If the doctor says “can you do surgery next Tuesday,” find out first if there’s any other non-surgical procedures. I hate to be blasphemous to the medical industry but first check with an acupuncturist (a good one that is recommended by friends who were actually helped by that acupuncturist) or a chiropractor. See if physical rehab can help first, or at least be tried without detrimental effects to the body part in question.

1. If you must do surgery make sure the surgeon has ample experience (no students!) and make sure a checklist is used durin the procedure (Atul Gawande has an excellent book on the topic of doctors using checklists.

1. You want to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible if you are having surgery there. Here’s a basic tip: Don”t have your surgery on a Thursday. Doctors don’t want to work on a weekend. You might be stuck there for the whole weekend if you just need to be in the hospital for a max two days.

1. If you are using a teaching hospital, try to avoid going there (if possible) during July. There is the notorious “July Effect” when interns become residents, residents become full-time doctors, etc. It’s the first time many of these new doctors are full time in their specialty and may not have the experience yet to accurately diagnose and prescribe the right medicines, etc. Here’s an article on the dangers of July in a hospital. (http://idiopathicmedicine.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/the-dangers-of-july-in-the-hospital/)

1. Make sure the doctor has clear handwriting on prescriptions. Believe it or not, the famous ability of pharmacists to read the handwriting of doctors is just not true. Here’s a recent article (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1578074,00.html) claiming that 7,000 deaths per year are caused by poor handwriting on prescriptions.

1. Avoid being plugged into an IV. If you can swallow liquids, drink the water, don’t have it put into you via a possibly contaminated IV unit.

11. Cleanliness. This one’s obvious. We collect bacteria throughout the day by touching doorknobs, staircase rails, elevator buttons, shaking hands, eating food, etc. Also, there’s the saying: “clean desk, clean mind.” In other words, keeping our environment clean is not only physically healthy but helps to reduce stress and makes you more productive. Reducing stress, as mentioned above, is key to avoiding many of the diseases that cause death.

1. Wash hands every time you go from outside to inside. Under the nails is one of the dirtiest parts of the entire body and once you take those nails and rub your eyes or scratch an itch, you are infecting yourself with any bacteria that grabbed onto the inside of those nails. Keep them short. Wash them regularly.
2. Brush your teeth. Bacteria is all over your mouth. Brushing after every meal is keep and before you go to sleep and after you wake up. It sounds annoying but brushing, flossing, and using a tongue scraper for anything that stays attached to your tongue will help prevent any disease and, of course, keep your breath clean.
3. Make your bed. Who doesn’t like to come home to a made bed.
4. Clean your desk.
5. This is a drag but shower every morning and night. When you go to sleep at night you have a whole day’s worth of bacteria on your. Why take that bacteria and put it all over your nice clean sheets when you can avoid it?

12. Avoid accidents. This almost seems like an oxymoron. The word “accident” implies there is some degree of luck involved. Like you were walking along outside of a building and something falls out of a high up window and hits you. That’s an accident that seems like just bad luck. Or is it. We know that 123,000 accidents a year occur. So lets break that down a little further.

About half the accidental deaths come from car accidents. So one thing we can do is simply avoid getting in cars. Now, that’s not always possible because we need cars to get to work. But a couple of thoughts:

- If you have a choice: live closer to work. Or take public transportation.
- If you don’t have a choice: try to avoid doing more than one activity at a time while in the car. Don’t eat, talk on the cell phone, don’t play with the radio.
- Don’t jaywalk (don’t be the recipient of a car accident if its easy to avoid).
- Wear a seat belt
- About 1/3 of accidents happen at home. Don’t get fancy and try to fix the TV antenna on the roof. Don’t get on a ladder if you don’t have to. Be careful when walking down stairs, etc.

The anti-aging industry makes billions trying to get you to take fancy pills., buy expensive equipment, do expensive medical tests, etc. But sometimes the simplest way to live longer is to avoid all the ways you were going to die.

The Hamster Wheel -Credits to Timothy Lee

The Hamster Wheel

Image via Wikipedia

If you talk to business travelers above a certain age, they’ll tell you about the good old days of airline travel. Airports used to be less crowded, the food was better, the service was more attentive, and the stewardesses were more attractive. This was because price controls kept fares high, and airlines competed for passengers with generous perks. The situation was great for the small minority of rich people and business travelers who could afford it because they didn’t have to deal with the hoi polloi clogging up the airports. But it sucked for everyone else, for whom an airplane flight was a rare luxury.

In the late 1970s, the law was changed to allow airlines to give consumers what they actually wanted, which was mostly lower prices. As fares fell, the airlines dropped most of the frills that once came with an airplane ticket. Today the food isn’t as good, service is mediocre and airports feature long lines and screaming children. But a lot more people can afford to fly home and visit their families, which is what’s really important.

This came to mind as I was reading Jonathan Rauch’s latest:

Every time someone who could have done good science does sloppy science, or does worse journalism instead of better journalism, or mediocre writing instead of fine writing, it’s a loss. When resources are scarce—and of course human talent is the most scarce and precious resource of all—it matters if blogging is inducing ADD in many of our best writers and thinkers, or driving talent away altogether.

I watch with growing concern as young journalists get channeled into content mills where they post three, seven, who knows how many blog snippets a day. I spoke with one young guy who told me he puts up seven posts a day and would like to break into longer form by doing only three. One of the most promising young journalists I know couldn’t take it and quit for medical school. Another young writer tells me he longs to “get off the hamster wheel.”

As I mentioned last week, Jonathan Rauch is old enough to remember the pre-Internet media world. Because media outlets had few competitors, they tended to be extremely profitable. As Roger Cohen andJohn Podhoretz have written, this allowed them to offer their writers a variety of perks that are hard to come by today, including a generous salary and a light schedule that allowed them to put a lot of time and effort into each story.

It’s not hard to see why Rauch would want to return to that world, just as some business travelers wish they could go back to the 1970s. But it’s important to remember that the declining fortunes of elite publications is inextricably linked to the democratization of publishing. Incumbent publications are having trouble making ends meet because they’re facing a lot more competition than they used to. And that competition is a direct consequence of the fact that everyone now has a freedom to write for a national audience.

It would be silly to deny that this has disadvantages. The New York Timesreally does do good work, and it’s been sad to see them lay people off. Writers now have to work harder to make a living and sometimes they’re tempted to cut corners. There really is a lot more “sloppy science” and “mediocre writing” than there used to be.

But the collapsing barriers to entry has also had tremendous benefits. In 1990, if you didn’t snag a coveted job at a national publication, you essentially didn’t get to be a writer at all. Today, anyone can have a blog. This has made the national conversation livelier, richer, and more interactive. It has created opportunities for people with non-traditional backgrounds to reach readers who are intensely interested in what they have to say. People with deep interests in niche subjects—linguistics, feminism, patent law, knitting—have access to an unprecedented range of material on their favorite subjects.

This is an issue I take personally because I’m probably one of the riff raff who wouldn’t have made the cut in the pre-Internet media ecosystem. The publication I do most of my writing for could only exist online. It has thin margins and asks its writers to turn stories around relatively quickly. Maybe Rauch would look down his nose at the work we do.

Publish Post

I’d love to have a job at a publication that gave me weeks to work on a story, but so far none of them has offered me a job. And indeed, no conceivable economic system could offer that kind of job to everyone who wants one. The great thing about the Internet is that you don’t need a job at one of those publications to write about topics of public concern. This is understandably irritating to longtime members of the profession that used to hold a lucrative monopoly on soapboxes. But in my view the increase in freedom for everyone else is an overw

helmingly positive development.

A Crisis in Reporting? - All credits to Timothy Lee

Clay Shirky is one of my intellectual heroes (see my 2008 interview with him), so I read his latest post on the future of reporting with interest. He says that as readers have shifted online, newspapers have suffered from an “analog dollars to digital dimes” problem: the amount advertisers are willing to pay for online readers is dramatically less than what they used to pay for print readers. Shirky argues that news organizations are going to have to learn to live with dramatically lower revenue per reader.

He makes some sensible recommendations for how the news industry and the broader society should deal with the situation. But what stuck out for me was Shirky’s uncritical endorsement of the conventional wisdom that we’re in the midst of a grim “crisis in reporting,” which, he says, “isn’t something that might happen in the future. A 30% reduction in newsroom staff, with more to come, means this is the crisis, right now.”

Shirky is sometimes criticized for the rose-colored tint of his spectacles, but here I think he’s giving too much credence to the pessimistic conventional wisdom. It’s clear that newspapers are facing a crisis, and obviously if you’re a newspaper employee or shareholder you should be worried. But whether this is a problem for the broader society is far from clear.

To tell whether the decline of newspapers is just a normal story of disruptive innovation or something the rest of need to worry about, we need to look at outputs, not inputs. It wasn’t a “crisis in telephony” when the switch to automatic dialing allowed AT&T to lay off thousands of phone operators (unless you got laid off). It wasn’t a “crisis in computing” when the PC put minicomputer manufacturers like DEC out of business. By the same token, a 30 percent decline in newsroom staff might just reflect increased journalistic efficiency.

How could this be? A reporter’s job is to collect, organize, and summarize information about important events in the world. The more of the world’s information that comes pre-organized, the easier the reporter’s job will be. And the Internet is a gigantic information-organizing machine. Sites like Google, Wikipedia, and Twitter provide vast amounts of information “pre-digested.” Reporters still have to do some work to get the information they need from these tools and turn them into publishable copy. But more and more of the basic work is done for us.

For example, in my last post, I included some statistics about Microsoft and Google’s patents. Because the patent office has a searchable online patent database, this only took about 20 minutes. I also save a ton of time any time I’m covering legal stories because statutes, court opinions, and other primary documents are usually available as PDF downloads. Similarly, Matt Yglesias regularly writes posts like this where he graphs some kind of data pulled from a government website. This kind of information retrieval is now so easy that we barely even think of it as reporting. But in the pre-Internet world it would often have been a much bigger undertaking.

Another example: I get many of my story ideas from Twitter. Every couple of weeks I do a tweet like this asking what I should be writing about. More often than not, one or more people reply with great suggestions. I also follow a number of activists, academics, and think tankers who do work related to my beat. Their tweets frequently give me story ideas. As a result, I spend less time hunting for story ideas, and more time actually writing them.

The Internet is also reducing duplication of reporting effort. The 20th century newspaper industry had a lot of reporters covering identical beats in different cities. Obviously, each metro area needs its own reporters covering city hall. But a ton of stuff in the newspaper—technology and medicine, national business and politics, movie and book reviews—isn’t tied to any specific metropolitan area. As the Internet eliminates geographic boundaries, there’s no longer a good rationale for having so many people writing redundant content.

Another important way the Internet makes reporters more productive is by reducing bureaucracy. A significant part of a newspaper reporter’s job involves negotiating with her editor about which stories she should write, when they’ll run, and how much space they’ll get. Print reporters sometimes waste time on stories that get spiked, file under-reported stories to meet arbitrary deadlines, or cut out interesting material to save space.

Shirky has called this a “filter, then publish,” process. In contrast, Forbes bloggers like me operate on a “publish, then filter” model. We write whatever we want, the Forbes editors decide which content to promote on the Forbes home page, and we’re paid based on the traffic we receive. This is more efficient not only because we don’t have to waste time negotiating with our editors, but also because there are fewer perverse incentives: we get paid if and only if we write stuff people want to read.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Add all of these factors up and I think it’s entirely plausible that the news industry’s productivity has improved enough to offset that 30 percent fall in newsroom headcounts.

Many of us look back at the 1970s and find it hard to imagine a world with just 3 or 4 national television networks. I suspect that in the 2030s, people will look back at the 1990s with the same kind of astonishment that people were satisfied with the limited amount of news available from a single newspaper. So why do so many people today see the decline of monolithic newspapers as a calamity rather than a sign of progress? Partly it’s cultural inertia, but I suspect it also has something to do with the fact that the companies whose oxes are being gored own some of the nation’s tallest soapboxes.