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Word Voting

August 11, 2009 by Openyear   Filed under Featured Leave a Comment

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If there’s a vote, and no one bothers to tally the vote, is it really a vote? Most would answer, "No". A tally transforms a choice into a vote. Publishing the numbers make the parts (individual voters) aware of the whole (all voters). If you live in the US, States Boards of Elections turn your ballot choices into votes through the magic of counting. But, democracy is more than voting for elected officials.

Social movements are democracy too. They’ve given women and minorities the vote, caused polluted ecosystems to be cleaned and preserved, and eliminated child labor in the US, among many other accomplishments. So, where’s the social movement vote?

Digg and other sites do a great job of turning the comments made on their sites into votes. Looking at the top rated comment(s) gives us a feel for how Diggers or others are thinking about a particular topic. But, to take a vote at the social movement level, we can’t measure the vote at the  comment level, as not everyone sees them, or votes on them. Instead, we must go with something simpler; the individual words themselves, repeated across all pages relevant to a topic, regardless of site.

Words, like money, are ubiquitous and exchanged continually. But, unlike money, words around issues, in the aggregate, aren’t tallied and reported on. So, for example, we can hear daily about which of the 2700+ stocks on the NYSE are up or down, and how the average reflects the mood of investors, as we should. But, what about the mood of the people in the US around healthcare? What are the 2700+ words they’re using around this issue? Which words are up or down? How are the averages reflecting their mood?

We’ve been noticing that every few weeks, it seems, articles on CEO pay tend to draw a disproportionate numbers of comments across the web. A recent example, was the the WSJ piece by Ellen E. Schultz, entitled Pay of Top Earners Erodes Social Security that appeared on July 21, 2009. Ellen stated the following in the second paragraph:

Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration data — without counting billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal radar screens that measure wages and salaries.

Within hours, bloggers from Digg, Reddit, and Think Progress responded. By July 23rd , 358 people made 564 comments across the 4 sites. We suspect that the consistency of stories around executive pay, and the responsiveness of the public to the issue, at minimum, are evidence of concern. At maximum, they may be evidence of a permanent shift in attitudes, or a movement

We decided to take a closer look, and ran some Openyear analytics to deconstruct the  comments into keywords so we could take a group pulse for all 358 participants. Basically, we analyzed keywords across all comments pertaining to the WSJ article, across all 4 sites, for all days, in terms of how much more frequently they were used in those comments, as compared to their ‘typical’ rate of occurrence in English. Like "man bites dog", we believe we’ve ranked these words in order of newsworthiness - signal over noise. We selected the first 1000 of the approximately 3800 keywords we ranked for presentation. We’re calling it Word Vote. Some highlights follow :

Semantic Category Keyword Rankings Avg. Rank
Pay income(6wealth(16) compensation(15compensated(91money(149) incomes(320) 100
Class rich(22wealthy(156poor(150) richest(195wealthiest(155) poorest(256) 156
Gap disparity(4) redistribution (18 ) inequality(24) redistribute(127) redistribute(185) egalitarian(344)  distribution(417) redistributed(427) 193

So, perhaps one sentiment that would emerge from the 358 if they could speak with one voice might be, "The pay class gap".

Earner(1) and tax(2) were the top 2 words. In general, we often observe a coercion/freedom debate around super earner pay; with some advocating increased taxation as a remedy (coercion) , and others opposed to redistribution, believing that earners should keep more (freedom). What’s seldom mentioned is a third way: individuals choosing to participate in better distribution up front based on meritocratic standards. Our favorite standard is influence.

There was a time, not too long ago, when debtors were imprisoned. This has long since given way to credit scoring and reporting. People choose to maintain their credit scores, they’re not forced to. We’re working on a social responsibility score to encourage super earners and earners to make win/win choices that benefit everyone and grow our economy smartly.

As you may know, we believe it’s good to share. So, we were rooting for the keyword "share" in the Word Vote results. But, share(1322) didn’t make the top 1000, and sharing(3749) came in almost dead last, together they averaged 2536. Greed(167) and greedy(704), averaged 435, doing nearly 6 times better. Pitchfork(165) and pitchforks(300), did even better, averaging 315, 8 times better than, "share". We like our candidate, "share". We think she’s got a great platform and charisma. She’s more than change you can believe in. She’s change you can make happen in the next 2 minutes by voting for (or against)  your favorite super earner sharing a % of his pay automatically with anyone who influences him. Thanks!

Super Earners

He earned $556M in 2008. Should Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, share his wealth? He earned $556M in 2008. Should Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison, share his wealth?

Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. Send Larry a message. Take the 2 minute survey.

He earned $12.5M in 2008. Should Bank of America CEO, Ken Lewis, share his wealth? He earned $12.5M in 2008. Should Bank of America CEO, Ken Lewis, share his wealth?

Bank of America CEO, Ken Lewis. Send Ken a message. Take the 2 minute survey.

He earned $5.7M in 2008.  Should GE CEO, Jeff Immelt, share his wealth? He earned $5.7M in 2008. Should GE CEO, Jeff Immelt, share his wealth?

GE CEO, Jeff Immelt. Send Jeff a message. Take the 2 minute survey.

He'll earn $400K+ in 2009. Should US President, Barack Obama, share his wealth? He'll earn $400K+ in 2009. Should US President, Barack Obama, share his wealth?

US President, Barack Obama. Send Barack a message. Take the 2 minute survey.

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