hmmm
All I really knew was that I had found the perfect place on the perfect wave, and I had remained there endlessly. Forever.
Allan Weisbecker, from In Search of Captain Zero: A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road.
A babysitting story which could save the world
August 19, 2008
Blade chances upon a remarkable parable thanks to the ever-eclectic folk at Slate.
Paul Krugman writes of how a group of young professionals organised a coupon system to enable them to take turns babysitting, so that members of the collective could do that which seems so distant a memory as soon as one has children, i.e. go out and have fun. However, things went awry with the system. Blade will not spoil the story and instead urges you to click here and read it, but suffice to say that economists in the group, rather than its lawyers, solved the problem.
Indeed, Krugman argues that “the story of the babysitting co-op is not a mere amusement. If people would only take it seriously – if they could only understand that when great economic issues are at stake, whimsical parables are not a waste of time but the key to enlightenment – it is a story that could save the world.”
That’s some claim to make. Blade suspects that his brother, himself a lawyer who was part of a similar babysitting co-op, would have an opinion on all this. As for Blade, he was never part of a babysitting co-op. He never amassed coupons which he could hold in reserve. And he never went out. As such, he is not in a position to empathise with the minutiae of Krugman’s parable. But it sounds good, all the same.
Meanwhile, women from the Women Workers Co-Operative, Hong Kong, rejoice at news that China has implemented new laws safeguarding the right to party – kids or no kids.
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Knowledge Bank
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke and Rohit Grover of Spada examine the importance of marketing and PR in a downturn. This article was originally published in Solicitors Journal, Practice Management Supplement, 28 April 2009, and has been reproduced by kind permission.
Environmental Reporting: Trends in FTSE 100 Sustainability Reports
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting. The white paper is available for download here.
Now available for download here is Spada’s latest white paper. Entitled ‘The Laity Bytes Back’, the paper looks at Web 2.0 and the professions.
In this paper, published in the International Journal of Business and Economics, David Brock, Tal Yaffe and Mark Dembovsky scrutinise large law firms, their strategies and measures of their effectiveness.
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke, MD of Spada, looks at how US law firms should approach hiring a UK PR agency. The piece is reproduced from Strategies – The Journal of Legal Marketing by kind permission of the Legal Marketing Association.
Towards 2012 – The New Legal Landscape
Spada’s white paper on the impact of the Legal Services act is now available to download here. The research recently featured on the front page of the Law Society Gazette.
Information Inflation: Can the Legal System Adapt?
George L. Paul, a partner in Lewis and Roca, LLP and Jason R. Baron, Director of Litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, discuss the “new inflationary dynamic” of information in this article from the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology. How do vast quantities of new writing forms challenge the legal profession, and how should lawyers adapt?
To suggest material for inclusion in Knowledge Bank, please e-mail us at spada@spada.co.uk or call + 44 207 269 1430