Good Thinking about Tea Parties

Ross Douthat here.  Jonathan Haidt here.

I’ll have more to say about the tea parties, extremists on both sides, and the culture wars soon. For now, I think  there’s something quite wrong with the mainstream (liberal) narrative about the tea parties, but I can’t put my finger on it. These two pieces are heading in the right direction.

Google and Wall Street

When I read this:

Google is using its vast database of web shopping data to construct the ‘Google Price Index’ – a daily measure of inflation…is working on “predicting the present” by using real-time search data to forecast official data that are only released with time lags.

I think to myself, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Google needs to find revenue streams other than search. At some point, Google is going to realize that

• Google is all about processing information
• Wall Street is all about processing information
• Google would be very good at doing what Wall Street is doing
• Doing what Wall Street is doing (better) would create an enormous revenue stream.