Need inspiration? Click on to see the next four best interactive Google Doodles.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: Got an idea for a Google Doodle? Send it to Who knows – your idea could be the next Google homepage. Google also holds logo design competitions for kids (the prize is a college scholarship and a $50,000 technology grant for their school) and even has a Google Doodle store that sells everything from T-shirts to stamps with any Google Doodle ever designed. Google says it chooses a variety of holidays, birthdays, and special events that both show off the personality of the company and its “love for innovation." Since then, Google has decorated more than 1,000 logos for everything from Claude Monet’s birthday to Pakistan’s Independence Day. Though not the complex Pac-Man game of today, it was so popular that Google decided to continue decorating its homepage when the occasion arose. The Google logo remained unadorned until 2000, when they asked their intern at the time (now head webmaster Dennis Hwang) to create a Doodle for Bastille Day. In 1998, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went to Burning Man and placed a small stick figure behind the second “o”, letting users know they were out of the office and deep in the desert. The idea of swapping out Google's logo for a “doodle” started before the company even incorporated. This is pretty indicative of Google’s Doodle philosophy: simple, fun, and a bit of history and personality thrown in for good measure. The description of the Doodle talked about senior Google designer Marcin Wichary’s childhood growing up watching his dad fix video game machines, and the “geopolitical” reach of this simple game at the time. The iconic Google letters were configured into the classic narrow passageways with neon dots, and when users clicked “insert coin” they could revisit their arcade days and play a round (or two or three or five) of Pac-Man. On May 21, 2010, Googlers were greeted with the first-ever interactive Google Doodle: a celebration of 30 years of Pac-Man. Lucas is a reminder that someone can make a difference just by posing questions that matter. “Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the ‘nature of India’ that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.”What became known as the “Lucas critique” of economic models has come in for its own critiques over time. But he was fascinated by the question of why some nations raise living standards for their people faster than others.“I do not see how one can look at figures like these without seeing them as representing possibilities,” he wrote in a 1988 paper. As a businessperson, you won’t go out and hire more workers.He isn’t remembered as unlocking a formula for economic growth. If you think a policy will cause inflation but not much growth, for instance, you’ll behave accordingly. Yet by raising a big question, and then more of them, he prompted others throughout the economics field to think in fresh ways. In a 1972 paper, he asked, in effect, whether a policy like expanding the money supply made sense if one doesn’t take into account the way people rationally adjust their expectations (and actions) as a result. Even the phrase he’s most associated with – “rational expectations” – wasn’t original to him. And by many accounts, his prescriptions were often wrong as well as right. This thought dates back at least to Socrates, and it’s been reflected in many a great teacher or thinker since.This week Robert Lucas, a University of Chicago economist who died Monday, is being remembered by his peers as perhaps the most important economist of his generation – one who in some ways reframed the entire field of “macro,” researching the economy as a whole. Yet this Nobel laureate is nowhere near as famous as, say, his Chicago colleague Milton Friedman. Sometimes asking questions is as important – maybe even more important – than finding answers.
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