Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1066

I just got off a flight where I spent an hour listening to this podcast: What Are the Secrets of the German Economy — and Should We Steal Them?

One of the key themes is that Germany has a “stakeholder economy”, rather than a “shareholder economy”, which is one way to describe the Anglo-Saxon model.

There’s also a lot of discussion around cities and spatial economics. 

For instance, there’s an argument that WW2 forced a decentralization of the German economy. Germany is one of the rare examples where a country’s busiest airport (Frankfurt) is not located in the country’s biggest city (Berlin).

Thanks Daniel for passing this podcast along. I enjoyed it.

Earlier this week I was on Adelaide Street (Toronto) for a morning meeting. This is further north than my typical routine.

For those of you not familiar with Toronto, Adelaide is a one-way street with separated bikes lanes. These “cycle tracks” were installed as part of a pilot project that launched back in summer 2014. As I’m sure you can imagine, they were highly controversial at the time. Many heated debates.

But if you stand on Adelaide Street during the morning rush, as I did earlier this week, I think you would be amazed to see just how widely used these lanes actually are. Here’s a video of Adelaide (just east of Spadina) in action. It is by Gil Meslin and was filmed sometime between 840 and 855am on a weekday.

However, I will say that I was far more impressed by the volume of bikes I saw in person. I wish I took a picture. They easily outnumbered the cars when I was there, which speaks to the latent demand for this sort of infrastructure. I can’t imagine a faster way to get across downtown in the morning.

So if you haven’t already, check out Adelaide (or Richmond Street, which is also part of the cycle tracks program).

“…the path to profit is to manufacture attention more cheaply than what you get paid for it.” - Ev Williams

A big part of our economy is centered around attention. Some would argue we are living in a de facto attention economy. That is now our scarce resource . There are only so many waking hours in a day and every company and social media platform is fighting for their sliver of your attention.

However, the irony of the attention economy is that, while it has gotten easier to make and share “content” with the world, the quality of that content matters less than the attention it garners. Because that’s what the system rewards. Whatever you may think about Trump, he has mastered the art of attracting attention.

Ev Williams – co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Medium – recently wrote a piece on this topic called: Words still matter . It is very much about the mission driving his publishing platform, Medium. Here is an excerpt:

It’s not that there aren’t journalists, publishers, and thinkers doing great work and putting it out there. But the realities of the attention economy are very tough for those who create things designed for anything but the widest possible (i.e., lowest-common-denominator) audience. For ad-driven sites, the revenue per reader has been dropping for years (while the experience worsens and privacy disintegrates), leaving little room for research, fact checking, or polish… let alone nuance or complexity. The system demands quantity. It demands speed. And it demands little else — except our clicks.

Their solution is the Medium Partner Program . It is an “open paywall” that allows publishers of great content to lock some of their best content behind a paywall. Their view is that to fix the attention economy, we need to move beyond ad-supported lowest-common-denominator content. 

This not entirely novel , but they are calling themselves the first “open paywall” platform. I would be curious to hear your thoughts about this in the comment section below. I’ve had a few people suggest to me that I employ a similar approach for this blog. I’m not convinced.