I was reminded this week of a primary premise in evolutionary psychology: we’re genetically programmed to emphasize information about danger and minimize information about pleasure.

This is a gross simplification of interesting science, but is a useful overlay to the confluence of economic statistics and contradictory commentary in recent weeks.

In today’s New York Times, the pragmatic Floyd Norris makes the argument that data is pointing to a strong economic recovery, even while conventional wisdom suggests that we’re mired in a “new normal” of stagnant performance.

Norris has staked out a niche is letting numbers do his talking. In the column, he points to several statistical developments that suggest many experts are downplaying the positive. One example he cites is the March employment report.

Employment is a lagging indicator. Employers can be slow to cut back when business turns down, and slow to rehire when it picks up. It stands to reason that when employers cut back sharply — as happened in this cycle — they will have to rehire faster than if they had been slow to fire, as was true in the two previous downturns.

I looked back at the recoveries after seven recessions from 1950 through 1982 and found that, on average, such a strong three-month performance of the household survey, defined as a gain of at least 0.8 percent in the total number of existing jobs, came seven months after the recession had ended, with a range of two to 13 months.

If the 2007-9 recession ended in August, as the index of coincident indicators would seem to indicate, the lag this time will have been seven months.

Mark Perry of Carpe Diem presented the trending of initial jobless claims since 1974 in a recent post. The chart is one point in an ongoing argument that Perry has been building that we’re experiencing a real recovery in the economy.

Perry consolidates his 10 primary points in a post on The Enterprise Blog. He characterizes this as a period of “solid and sustained economic expansion.”

The positive proof points are wide-ranging: manufacturing activity up, restaurant activity rebounding, manufacturing accelerating, job growth increasing. (Perry points out that very few people have reported on the fact that private-sector employment increased by 1.1 million jobs in the first three months of 2010.)

The consensus of most economists is that the Great Recession ended sometime around June 2009. In that case, we are now nine months into an economic recovery, and the economic data and reports summarized here all point to a recovery that is real and sustainable. While this rebound may not be quite as strong as other post-recession expansions of the past by some measures, there is at least now unmistakable evidence that the recession ended last year, the U.S. and world economies and financial markets have recovered and are gaining momentum almost daily, and there are no signs on the economic horizon of a double-dip recession.

The recovering economy was a theme in a conversation I had with one of my key executives last week.

“Don’t expect your customers to recognize that the market is turning,” I said. “They’ve been burned by the dramatic drop in the market, and won’t believe any improvement is going to last until it’s well underway.”

Acknowledging this lag in human perception is an important part of managing your own focus and energy. In this case, our observation translates into a specific sales approach: Be positive, emphasize the benefit of your service, and keep encouraging customers to regain the hope that accompanies investments in marketing, because there is a shift in the way their prospects and customers are seeing the world.

From the overall perspective of the economy, it’s difficult for people to imagine a strong recovery that doesn’t incorporate some of the activity that drove the housing bubble — high levels of construction and resale home activity.

The economic recovery is likely going to incorporate a “new normal in real estate” and a continuing correction in personal and corporate balance sheets. What is clear is that the overall economy has sufficient scale to mitigate the drag of these trends.

While the crashing of the housing bubble was highly disruptive, in the end it has only resulted in the elimination of about 2.3 million jobs. As households re-form and housing inventories gets worked off, new construction will return to the new homes and multi-family markets. The characteristics of this construction will be different: few high-volume (and high margin) tract developments and high-end rental and condominium buildings, and more custom and mid-range projects.

This is how it feels to recover from a bad blow. You need a moment to believe that you’re not about to get hit again, and when you go about your business, you keep looking over your shoulder, thinking that something bad is going to happen again.

Like my mom said, dust yourself off and get moving.

Steve Rosenbaum did a great interview with Columbia’s Ana Seave that was published on MediaBizBloggers earlier this week.

Seave is one of the key contributors to The Curse of the Mogul, required reading for anyone in the media business who wants to dig into the critical issues facing media companies and their business models.

Seave’s thought a lot about content, cost, quality and digital. Media brands can create increased loyalty with their readers, she believes, by enriching their experience of content. A key element of that is curation, Seave explains:

I think that the actual idea of curation and aggregation and packaging stuff and being the in between, between the content production and getting it to a consumer is exactly the right place to be. I think that video is really the future of the Internet as well. The text business is where I come from and where I live and it’s easy to search, and so forth and so on, but YouTube as I understand it is the second largest search engine. What is that about? That means that people who are younger than me think of things in video and it is really, really important for all media companies to be in pictures at this point. So, that’s the reason why I am interested in Curation, I have a lot of faith in this space and I think it’s gonna go really far, and it’s gonna be in the right place with the right technology. (LINK: http://bit.ly/cPDkae)

The combination of curation and wholly-original content goes at the core of the cost issue for a publisher. One of the fundamental challenges of transitioning a print content model to the web is that the value of the ad inventory online doesn’t support that same content costs as the value of the print ad page.

Ultimately, content costs are a by-product of hours of labor. By shifting talented content professionals to a mode where they are able to identify and share good content — thereby extending the brand “voice, as Seave calls it — as well as create that content, the business is able to increase the ad inventory attributable to the content costs.

This is the kind of thinking that is both relevant to the digital market and attacks the puzzle of costs.

Congratulations to my friend and former colleague Doug Manoni, who was named CEO of Source Media this week.

Doug and I worked at Cowles Business Media through the better part of the 1990′s. At the end, Doug was my CFO.

He’s an interesting study for people who wonder about the future of business-to-business companies. Doug is a logical and sensible guy who understands that everything in the end comes down to cash: Who will pay you and who do you have to pay? He’s intellectually curious and enjoys interacting with new people. He doesn’t get overwhelmed by the things he doesn’t know and he’s grown more and more confident over the years in his own decisions.

This personality has helped Doug develop a bias towards extending diversifying his businesses to incorporate higher value content. He’s made this transition twice before from traditional advertising-based businesses successfully. I’m sure he’ll manage to do it again in this role.

[A note: the Chairman of Source, Marty Maleska, is member of the NCI board.]

“If necessity knows no law, then neither does power”

I’ve been musing over the state of our national discourse a lot recently.

The stakes of our socioeconomic quandary feel very stark. Mountains of debt and millions of unemployed putting pressure on a systems of goods, services and production that looks like what philosophers call a self-contained system, which only functions with internal logic and is easily proved fallible by external logic.

So, common sense says that smart people would be working together with an acknowledgment of what the biggest priorities are in order to create a new approach, right?

Wrong. Instead, we appear to be in the midst of one of the most cynical periods in modern political and economic history. Break the world down into three groups: Vox Politic, Vox Populi and Vox Media. The way people are feeling, the way politicians are acting and the way that the media is interpreting is creating more alienation, disaffection and confusion that ever before.

Paul Krugman today in the Times had a very balanced column suggesting that the issues facing the Obama administration don’t have to do with scope, as popularly suggested, but with faulty policy. Whether you agree with him or not, the column attempts to move the dialogue to issues and solutions away from ad hominen attacks of ability and motivation.

I witnessed another discourse recently that reinforced my sense that concern about the partisan bias of the media and the political forum is removing some of the partisan intensity of private conversations.

Here’s a sample of a Facebook dialogue between two former high school classmates. A bit of background: I went to an all-boys Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island run by Benedictine Monks. My dad was a teacher there. The kids at the school were smart, were taught with intellectual rigor and came from all over. For such a small school, the alumni body has remarkable diversity of interests, views and life choices. This dialogue is between two men who represents what on the surface would appear to be highly divergent choices about life, the role of money, the role of culture and the importance of political discourse.

Call them Frick & Frack. I encourage you to read through the dialogue. What I find interesting is how resonant each argument is. How polarized these arguments appear in public discourse. And, how aligned both contributors are by their concern and interest.

Frick: Might this cover be implying that Barack is not only incompetent but also living in la-la land? The proof is in in the pudding and, according most credible, unbiased and objective takes on reality, not tainted by ideology or emotion, Obama has failed miserably on all the crucial counts: the economy, Iran, health care a…

Frack: Question the received opinion. As you are no doubt aware, Obama has also had to contend with some of the most difficult challenges any recent president has faced. A near meltdown of the housing market. Bankruptcy of the auto companies. A quagmire in Afghanistan. Possible meltdown of the Chinese economy. Historically speaking, a year is far too soon to make a reasoned assessment.

Frick: … failed so far… with more than 3 million jobs lost in the last year alone, an Iran that, without Israeli intervention, will soon be a nuclear power and unparalleled deficit (borrowing) spending that puts us, literally, at the mercy of China, Obama has put policies in place that point America in a downward direction instead of up, back in the … See Moreblue and in a more powerful position. It’s possible that Obama can still right the ship and turn things around, but right now the smart money says the economy is in for a double dip and that a new wave of foreclosures could very well be right around the corner. If that occurs, or if there is another successful terrorist attack on the mainland, Obama will be a one term President and his place, right alongside Jimmy, will be a foregone conclusion. I hope, for all of our sakes, that time and history prove me wrong. I would much rather have a robust economy and no more innocent life lost at the hands of Islamic extremist.

Frack: What do you expect him to do? Adopt the Ron Paul solution to all our woes and print a 10 trillion dollar banknote, hand it to the Chinese, and say “Here. Debt paid. Now go to hell”? Complex problems take time-consuming consensus building to solve. Obama has smarts that Carter didn’t have. Give him a chance, bwah, and your fondest hopes may come true, even if later rather than sooner.

Frick: That’s pretty much what he has done. He took a deficit that Bush was responsible for and, instead of trying to turn things around, turned to the Chinese and compounded Bush’s folly by borrowing far, by far, more than Bush or any other US President for that matter. It’s not a question of me giving him a chance that will determine his success.  It’s a question of the policies he has put in place and, so far, I don’t see any policies that offer, in a fundamental, core or pivotal way, any reason to believe there is hope or positive change in the air. What I see is old style Chicago politics with corruption, back room deals and bribery being the coin of the realm. He’s proving to be the biggest flim-flam man of all time by promising us one thing and delivering something altogether different. What happened to being above board, transparent and bi-partisan? The country is more divided now than it was just a year ago and more is done behind closed doors than under any administration in recent memory.

Frack: I just hate to see him fail, and feel that attacks on his policies are more partisan in nature than not.

Frick: You may be right, and I may be being partisan without knowing it, but I believe, above all and even more, that I am giving and have given him a fair chance. So far the results haven’t been good and, when you get past the double talk, spin and mumbo jumbo, there is no reason to think they are going to get much better anytime soon. Key economic indicators in housing, commercial real estate and the general economy don’t look good. Further, evidence that a bubble, due to cheap money and overvalued assets, may be what has pumped up the markets thus far. Again, I hope I am wrong. Believe me, I have nothing to gain and everything to lose of there is a double dip in the economy or if there is another successful terrorist attack in the US. My family was fortunate enough and lucky enough to weather the last storm. I’m not sure more government is the answer. I’m concerned for my families ability to withstand any more inclement weather.

Frack: Yah, the financial DEW line was talking of a double dip as far back as April of ’08. And it could happen. I just hope the prognosticators are correct about commercial real estate not being quite as over-extended as housing.

Frack: What irks me most is people making pre-judgments so they can be first in line to say I told you so. I’m more interested in full-spectrum analyses which offer an array of probabilities right up to sigma 10.

Frick: Yeah, but don’t you have to wait until the game is all but over for that? At that point you won’t be able to have any hand in the outcome and will just have to live with what is rather than squeal like a pig and, hopefully, at least get a little oil while holding on to your ankles for dear life.

Frack: Heh. If you got some sharp boys on your staff, you can do the spadework, pile up your Fuck You money, and not spend your golden years working at Aardvark Body Rub Studios, scrounging for chump change and slapping hot oil on the backs of men who look and smell like Ferlin Husky.

http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Trade-Ever-Behind-Scenes/dp/0385529910

Me: Ok. This was alarmingly smart and civilized. Must be the product of a rigorous Benedictine education. Can’t figure which point of view is right. The mess we’re in has been building for 15 years, when the borrowing capacity of consumers and businesses was reached and the only was to boost consumption and spur growth was to lower the cost of money and increase leverage. Bingo: you get bubbles. Obama has no choice but to play the hand he’s dealt. So, the option is to keep a fundamentally corrupt financial system on life support by providing a federal subsidy. That’s all fine, and while it’s unfortunate, the outsized compensation of the players in finance is a non-central issue.

What is central is what else to do. The one thing that has to happen is job creation — at any short-term cost, provided that the jobs are sustainable. The second thing is that the cost structure of social well-being (health and entitlement) needs to be lowered, so as to reduce the drain on the economy and create more resources for new development.

So, the measure of Obama is whether he is helping to stimulate activty that addresses our two biggest domestic priorities, and whether he is communicating in a clear and consistent fashion what we are doing, why it matters and what our expectation is about the results.

He’s doing miserably on the second front.

On the first front he’s put a ton of stuff in motion, but appears too willing to dilute key elements, sacrificing principal to expedience.

I don’t know that any of us know enough about what’s going on behind closed doors to know whether he’s gotuch choice but to comprise. The country is in a pretty tight spot. But we can confidently say that he’s providing none of the clarity and perspective that the country needs from him.

Frack: Throw the rascals out. ALL of them. The lobbyists first and foremost. (Like that will ever happen….)

Frick: Hey Dan, Thanks for coming in, summing it up, giving an overview and tying a ribbon on it. It’s good to know we made some sense even if none of us are quite sure what’s coming down the road.

Me: I wouldn’t call it a bow! Just thinking out loud. And Frack, we’ve tried throwing assorted clusters of the rascals out a few times over the past 25 years. It’s like Zombie-fluid: the idealists turn rascally once they are exposed. I’m wondering where the better idea is.

Frack: 25 years? “Throw the Rascals out” goes back to 1828! And you’re right; reformers tend to take on the attributes of the machine they work inside of. Because by the time they make it to the top, they’ve internalized the ethics of their profession–or lack thereof.

It strikes me that if necessity knows no law, than neither does power.

Wishing everyone a safe and healthy Happy New Year. A special thank you to everyone at NCI. In 2009 you demonstrated remarkable strength, perseverance, energy and good spirits. My wish for all of you is that in 2010 your labors bear fruit. I hope that we all remember the lessons of the past year and that we are put in a position to help others grow, build and recover.

Saturday evening, sitting through previews at the 9:30 showing of Pirate Radio (not recommended, btw), I checked the Twitter stream and was struck by a strong Tweet from @jayrosen_nyu.

Rosen, for those of you who aren’t touched by his wide-reaching social graph, is a professor of journalism at NYU, as well as an early and active adopter of interactive and community-driven information platforms.

Rosen is a prototype for using Twitter: his streams are structured around a core idea, then aggregate disparate perspectives around the idea, ideally creating dialogue and engagement among his followers. He clearly believes that arguments should be out in the open, and that citing your sources and supporting your points are basic requirements of intelligent discourse.

In that vein, his tweet jumped out at me, at 9:30 at night, in my seat in the movie theater. (To make sense of this, reach the second Tweet in the graphic below first.)

A blanket statement, with no context in that tweet, to rebut people who make blanket statements, with no content or source. That’s ironic. And, that’s one of the challenges of managing the 140-character constraint of the Twitter protocol.

Now, if I’d been more active on Twitter during that Saturday after Thanksgiving, I would have seen that the Tweet that I was struck by was part of a thread that had begun at 11:30 that morning, with specific links to the sources of information that he was critiquing.

Rosen sent me a direct tweet to clear up my misperceptions. The first, at 10:30 that Saturday night, while I was working hard to stay awake during the movie, pointed me to the original link of the story that he was commenting on throughout the day.

The second came the next afternoon as was an elegant and detailed rebuttal to anyone who felt like he was being what Bill Simmon’s calls in The Book of Basketball a Grumpy Old Editor. (Note: Rosen, who I don’t know, is probably the same age as I am, if not a little younger.)

Click on the link in the direct message and you’ll got to Rosen’s Tumblr account, where he has aggregated a collection of examples of people referring to the great “information wants to be free” cabal with no specific sourcing.

What can you take away from this, besides the fact that I was ill-advisedly critical and firmly corrected? (I mean, it’s not like I was getting into any kind of intelligent debate here…I was making a point that had even less context that Rosen’s single tweet.)

First, the challenge of Twitter is maintaining the context of your Tweets when you are one of a multitude of voices flowing through assorted Twitter streams. It requires work and commitment of the type Rosen brings each day, and even then, you can be misunderstood, misquoted or mis-cited.

Second, a commitment to intellectual honesty can build stronger foundations of information and knowledge. Engagement with honesty creates more understanding.

And third, the level of confusion around the underlying media models that is discussed and debated among different intellectual camps is creating an incredible amount of content, which generates a high degree of traffic. That’s media, for certain.

Don’t be put off by the title of Jonathan Knee’s book The Curse of the Moguls. If you’re interested in the underlying dynamics of the media business and are curious about how value will be created in the future, this is a very insightful read.

Take the Internet, for instance.

Whenever someone suggests to you that breaking down barriers to entry is good news, hold tight to your wallet. A decrease in barriers inevitably means more competition, and more competition means less-lucrative businesses. The introduction of the Internet has only accelerated this trend of value destruction among incumbent media players, without creating many profitable newcomers.

The Internet strikes at the very heart of the core competitive advantages historically enjoyed by traditional media companies—economies of scale and captive customers. First, it radically reduces the fixed-cost nut required to engage in all manner of activities. And it all but eliminates the actual or psychological cost that impedes a user from trying an alternative product or services.

The FineOnMedia blog yesterday had a short interview with the new editor of BusinessWeek, who talked a little about his approach to his new position.

Today, Jon Fine tweeted that he was leaving BusinessWeek.

Of course, Jon hasn’t been writing the FineonMedia blog for the past several months, as he’s been off on a sabbatical, traveling around the world with his wife Laurel Touby. And, the blog isn’t FineonMedia any longer.

I’ve been fortunate over the years to have a fairly constant dialogue with Jon about media, politics, the overwhelming randomness of fortune, the future of content and stuff like that. Over the past 18 months or so, he’s written some of the more interesting perspectives about the rapid shifts the media industry has undergone.

Here’s one of his more interesting takes on the future of content conundrum.

You can always follow Jon on Twitter at @jonfine.

TMG Brand Communications, the NY-based marketing and communications agency of record for NCI, was awarded eight Communicator Awards from the International Academy of Visual Arts for work it did for its clients last year.  The statues just arrived in the mail and Tami, the CEO, wanted to share the moment.  It’s a cute video.  Among the award-winning work were projects for The Real Estate Book, Apartment Finder and Unique Homes.  You can learn more about TMG at their web site.  [Full disclosure:  I'm privileged to be married to the Founder & CEO of TMG, Tami McCarthy]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG7_VoL7D0Y

It works with kids, why won’t it work with adults?  After all, we all have a child inside us.

Watch.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw