Marginal Revolution

How many Kindles has Amazon sold?

240,000.  I thought this sentence was intriguing:

And if a new Kindle comes out targeted at the textbook/school market, sales could ramp up higher.

I still recall Yana having to lug all those heavy textbooks around.

Hypergamy is the word of the day.

Yes, men are also, to their own detriment, continually surrounded with images of exceptionally attractive women. But this has less practical import, because—to say it once more—women choose.

Or:

The decline of matrimony is often attributed to men now being able to “get what they want” from women without marrying them. But what if a woman is able to get everything she wants from a man without marriage? Might she not also be less inclined to “commit” under such circumstances?

This essay is not politically correct and at times it is misogynous and yes I believe the author is evil (seriously).  The main behavioral assumption is that women are fickle.  So they are monogamous at points of time but not over time; Devlin then solves for the resulting equilibrium, so to speak.  The birth rate falls, for one thing.  The piece also claims that the modern "abolition" of marriage strengthens the attractive at the expense of the unattractive.  Some of you will hate the piece.  I disagree with the central conclusion, and also the motivation, but it does seem to count as a new idea.  If you're tempted, read it.

I thank Robin Hanson for the pointer.

Silly questions to bug people with

You devote two hours a week to sports fandom, you say?  How much would you have to be paid to give those two hours up?  You'll be paid in terms of extra time.  So if you give up your two hours of sports fandom, the benevolent genie gives you three hours for something else, whatever is your next best activity or activities.  That means a net gain of an hour a week and a time rate of return of 50 percent.  You won't do that?  How about four hours back and a time rate of return of 100 percent?  Nope.  Really?

Sports must be fun.  Well...why aren't you watching more sports?

OK, go draw your marginal utility curves and show your MU for sports first way above your MRS and then dropping off a cliff.  What's the hard-to-substitute-for "Lancastrian Z good" that makes sports so imperative for two hours but so inessential for three?

The language tax

Or should I have called this post "The language subsidy"?  Anyway, here is the latest from David Albouy, courtesy of the NBER:

The wage differential between Francophone and Anglophone men from 1970 to 2000 fell by 25 percentage points within Quebec, but only by 10 points Canada-wide, largely because the wages of Quebec Anglophones fell by 15 points relative to other Canadian Anglophones. Accordingly, the Canadian measure of the Francophone wage gap better reflects the changing welfare of Francophones than the Quebec measure. Over half of the reduction in the Canadian Francophone wage gap is explained by rising Francophone education levels. In Quebec, the declining number and relative wages of Anglophone workers is best explained by a falling demand for English-speaking labour.

Here is the paper.

Assorted links

1. New libertarian economics MP3s, including on monetary policy

2. The paradox of thrift; excellent

3. The economics of cables

4. The best documentaries?  What about Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story?

5. Hail Andy Karsner

Freedom Fries Under Attack

The Los Angeles council has just passed on ordinance banning new fast food restaurants in a poor section of South/Central LA.  William Saletan calls it Food Apartheid and writes:

We're not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We're talking about banning the sale of food to adults....It's true that food options in low-income neighborhoods are, on average, worse than the options in wealthier neighborhoods. But restricting options in low-income neighborhoods is a disturbingly paternalistic way of solving the problem.

Milton Friedman once said:

I don't think the state has any more right to tell me what what to put in my mouth than it has to tell me what can come out of my mouth.

Friedman was talking about drug prohibition but today the target could just as easily be food prohibition.

Hat tip on the Friedman quote to Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek.

My favorite things Ohio

I'm hardly here for long, so here goes:

1. Author: There's Sherwood Anderson and William Dean Howells and Toni Morrison; I'll pick the latter though none are true favorites of mine.   

2. Director: Wes Craven remains underrated; I still like his The Serpent and the Rainbow, among others.  I can't think of a notable movie set in Ohio, can you?

3. Painter: George Bellows's reputation has shot up in the last twenty years; here's an unusual Bellows print.  I very much like the botanical paintings and prints of Jim Dine, although I can't find a good one on-line.

4. Popular music: I can't think of much...Boz Scaggs doesn't count nor does Peter Frampton.  Lonnie Mack's The Wham of That Memphis Man! is one of the least known great albums.  Doris Day is a very good singer and do see Pillow Talk if you don't already know it.

5. Jazz: There is Art Tatum, especially the early Capitol work, not so much the later Pablo recordings.  Billy Strayhorn was often behind the best Duke Ellington arrangements.

6. Classical music recording: George Szell's Beethoven's 3rd remains a landmark recording, or try his Piano Concerti set with Leon Fleisher.

7. Philosopher: Willard van Orman Quine. most of all Word and Object.  Now that's a favorite.

8. Sculptor: Maya Lin did the Vietnam Memorial though she hasn't had much of a second act.

The bottom line: The achievement from this state is remarkably well-distributed across different artistic fields and genres.  Why?  Is it because the state has so many different cities of at least middling size?  Or is it because the state straddles the East and the Midwest?  Sadly there is no Cincinnati chili for me this time.

Addendum: Angus of Ohio comments.

What I Haven't Been Reading

1. Red State Blue State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, by the consistently impressive Andrew Gelman.

2. Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic; so many smart, virile young men, all writing about destruction.

3. Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust, by Elena Panaritis.  An update on the debates on Hernando de Soto and the associated land and property issues.

4. The Mirrored Heavens, by David J. Williams.  A science fiction story for people who take the idea of space elevators for granted.

5. The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth, by the noted law and economics scholar Robert C. Ellickson.

If I'm not reading them, it's because I've been spending my time with Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Norris's McTeague, both for my Liberty Fund conference in Cleveland.

Getting serious

Saudi Arabia's religious police have announced a ban on selling cats and dogs as pets, or walking them in public in the Saudi capital, because of men using them as a means of making passes at women, an official said on Wednesday.

...Othman said that the commission has instructed its offices in the capital to tell pet shops "to stop selling cats and dogs".

Here is the full story.  This is, of course, a net benefit for the offenders to date.  The newly created artificial scarcity increases the conversation value of the already owned animals and also confers a positive wealth effect on the wrongdoers.  Is it not better to stop xxxx by giving everyone a pet and thus eliminating its conversational value?  By the way, if this edict is enforced, we can expect an increase in the pet birth rate and also a greater number of abandoned pets.

The final question, of course, is how do you use a pet cat to make a pass at a woman?  I've heard of people walking their cats, but I expect it is not an easy experience.  To limit sex, cats should be subsidized, not taxed.  No?

John Cochrane on the Milton Friedman protest letter

Read John's response here (the original letter is here).  In my view the damning bit is this one:

...it is to me sadder still how atrociously written this letter is. These people devote their lives to writing on social issues, and teaching freshmen (including mine) how to think and write clearly.  Yet it’s awful.

Recommended for those who like polemic and mutual recrimination.

I thank a loyal MR reader for the pointer.

David R. Henderson asks

This is from the comments and in the context of the financial market bailouts:

"Why aren't you free-marketeer crusaders screaming your heads off?!"

My answer is that I have been. Reporters have interviewed me about it and sometimes they report my "screams" and sometimes they don't. Re Tyler's blase response, I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion, after having read his site almost daily for over a year, that Tyler is not a free-market crusader. He's a first-rate economist, but his passion seems to be almost solely about the analytics rather than the policies.

Am I wrong, Tyler?

I would note a few points:

1. I have very much favored the "bailouts" to date.  I don't favor that they were necessary but of course that latter attitude may or may not be libertarian in its derivation.

2. My tone stems from my personality, namely that I rarely get mad.  And in any policy debate, I don't assume that the people on my side intellectually are somehow morally superior or more honest.  In any particular case I usually give that 50-50.  It's also worth noting that perhaps we shouldn't judge partisanship from tone, just as we shouldn't judge linguistic fluency from the quality of a person's accent (which we tend to do).

3. A good blog should be subversive and help you see the faults in the author's own positions.  Ask whether the blogs you are reading in fact provide that service.  Self-subversion ought also, in the long run, to benefit liberty and other important values.

4. I think very often in international terms, so I see even most left-wing Americans (e.g., Ezra Klein) as having a relatively similar world view to my own.  Why focus on the local political conflict when so many presuppositions are shared?  When it comes to all-important questions about "how should we live?" it may well be that Ezra and I are pretty close together.  We should attach greater value to those commonalities of perspective.

5. I am very libertarian compared to the American center but moderate compared to most libertarians.

I am not sure I have answered David's question.

Why did the HMO revolution fail?

Mark Thoma cites this passage from Paul Krugman:

During the 1990's it seemed, briefly, as if private H.M.O.'s could play that role. But then there was a public backlash. It turns out that even in America, with its faith in the free market, people don't trust for-profit corporations to make decisions about their health.

Read the whole link for a recap of Mark's debate with Arnold Kling.  In my view what people objected to was not the for-profit status of HMOs per se but rather that they could be told they can't get all the care they want.  That view will remain.  That's one reason why covering 45 million or so additional Americans will lead to rising rather than falling health care costs.

On the administrative expenses of private health insurers, that is, at best, a one-time savings and health care costs still will be rising.  It's also hard to argue that a) the really sick people are often denied care or coverage by private insurance, and b) we can pick up those same people and still lower total costs.  It's the sick people who account for most of the costs, at any margin, and most of those costs come from medical procedures.

As the possibility of a real Democratic majority draws closer, expect to see more and more cognitive dissonance on this issue.  There's a perfectly coherent case for greater government involvement based on the desire to spend more resources to alleviate the financial insecurity of many sick Americans.  But you are going to hear the "free lunch" version of the argument instead, based on the belief that the properties of American and European health care systems are somehow interchangeable at will.

That said, people on my side of the issue should admit that we could lower overall health care costs (or at least slow their rise) by having a true single-payer plan and putting most doctors on fixed salaries in small cooperatives, thereby altering their incentives to spend on wasteful capital expenditures.  (How many years would it take for costs to fall?)  That's not, however, what we'll be getting, so beware the bait and switch.  Under any plausible health care reform scenario, health care expenditures in America will rise rather than fall.  If only we had a betting market on this...

Addendum: Here is Arnold's more direct reply.  Here are related remarks from Megan McArdle.

The ancient Greek computational mechanism

We now know a little more:

After a closer examination of the Antikythera Mechanism, a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The device also had a likely connection with Archimedes.  Here is the full story.

Why blogs should cover some topics randomly

Think of a blog as competing with both Google and Wikipedia, among other aggregators.  If you knew you wanted to read about "the minimum wage," you could bypass Tyler and Alex and Google to the best entries (some of which might include us, of course).  But with Google and Wikipedia you must choose the topic.  A good blog writer can randomize the topic for you, much like a good DJ controls the sequence of the music.  Sometimes you might trust us more than you trust other aggregators, but we can't count on that and arguably the other aggregators improve at a rate faster than we do.

Flying puffin!

Sentences to fear

Covered bonds issued by "too big to fail" banks are basically equivalent to mortgage backed securities guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie.

Here is much more, though I cannot see that the credit of the United States government is in danger.  There is a) the printing press, and b) our location on the left side of the Laffer Curve.  The point remains that additional debt for the major banks, while arguably necessary, weakens the off-balance sheet position of our government.

Markets in everything, the riches of Japan once again

So much for fixed costs, this time it's weird drinks.  How about "Bilk": 70 percent beer, 30 percent milk?  That's only the beginning.  There's a cheese drink, desalinated seawater (hey, isn't that expensive?), placenta drink (made from swine placenta) and eel soda.  And if that's not enough for you, here is last year's list.  As I like to say, if you're not thinking about Japan every day, you've yet to wake up.

Why isn't Asian music more popular?

Going back to some old requests, Eric H., a loyal and perceptive MR reader and commentator, asks:

Why do the US (a wealthy country) and Africa (a poor continent) put out more influential modern music than Asia (a populated continent of both wealthy and poor extremes)?

Where do I start?

1. Most African music has scales very similar to those of European music and thus we are arguably considering a unified and indeed accessible style.

2. Many African musics emphasize rhythms and rhythm is arguably the most universal element of music and thus it is relatively easy to export.  American music has in this regard a strong African component, for obvious historical reasons.

3. The micro-tonal musics, as we find in India and the Middle East, don't spread to many countries which do not already have a micro-tonal tradition.  Cats wailing, etc., though it is a shame if you haven't trained your ear by now to like the stuff.  It's some of the world's finest music.

4. Many Asian musics, such as some of the major styles of China and Japan, emphasize timbre.  That makes them a) often too subtle, and b) very hard to translate to disc or to radio.  African-derived musics are perfect for radio or for the car.

5. African music is really, really good.  And America is really, really good at entertaining people.  It's an unstoppable alliance.

Artistic disintermediation

A small menagerie of new Damien Hirst pickled animals took a bow yesterday, including a new shark, a zebra, a calf with solid gold horns and hoofs valued at up to £12m, and even a unicorn - a white foal fitted with a resin horn, rather than an apparition from a fairytale.

All have been churned out by his small army of assistants this year for an auction at Sotheby's in September which will sell more than 200 pieces. The auction is predicted to raise £65m, comfortably setting a new world record for the artist, and blazing a trail which other artists will watch with interest, of bypassing the gallery and dealer system and going straight to auction.

Both the Gagosian Gallery, and Jay Jopling's White Cube, his American and British dealers, have given the auction their blessing, possibly through gritted teeth...

If you are a dealer this is big news and indeed bad news.  But why not?  Hirst doesn't need gallery publicity or buyer recruitment.  Since galleries tend to sell their best works to loyal repeat buyers ("why?" is a good question), this implies that "seniority" will matter less and less for assembling a good collection.  That favors foreign buyers and hedge fund types.  Here is the link.  Here is Felix Salmon's very good post on the economics of contemporary art.

The economics of vengeance

Within a given country, people who have been victims of the same kind of crime (here, a burglary) tend to be more vengeful, but not if they have been victims of a different crime, like mugging.

Of course the basic idea comes from Adam Smith.  Here is the full story, which features commentary by GMU economists.  Here is my previous post on the topic.

"Markets" in everything

Playboy magazine in Braille.  (The link is safe for work, by the way.)  It is produced by...er...The Library of Congress.

Thanks to Jason Kottke for the pointer.

Are books overwritten?

...having said that, spending a lot of time on the internet, as I have since 2002, has rubbed my nose in something that hadn't really bothered me before then: namely just how overwritten so many books and magazine articles are. Seymour Hersh? He's great. You could also cut every one of his pieces by at least 50% and lose exactly nothing. And I'm not picking on Hersh. At a guess, I'd say that two-thirds of the magazine pieces I read could be sliced by nearly a third or more without losing much. That's true of a lot of books too.

Here is the full piece, by Kevin Drum.  My view is that many readers want overwritten books to tranquillize themselves, just as they enjoy dull, soothing voices on the radio.

Readers, do you agree that most books are overwritten?  Please write your opinion of Kevin Drum's point in the comments and feel free to refer to specific books.  My favorite rock star, the extraordinary Hillel, would like to again create a song from your opinions.  I will link to the song once it is ready.  Hillel assures me that the quality of his song will reflect the quality of your input.  Be poetic!  Think music!  Overwrite, if you wish!

Civil society

Mortgage fraud is terrible, but as crimes go it is a sign of how peaceful so much of the world has become:

A man once convicted of heading up a ruthless Haitian death squad that is blamed for raping and killing political rivals has been convicted of carrying out a mortgage fraud scheme in the United States.

Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, 51, former leader of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, or FRAPH, was convicted Friday of arranging millions of dollars in fraudulent financing for three Brooklyn properties, according to a statement from the New York attorney general's office.

Ask any Haitian about FRAPH.  Here is the full story.  At least the CIA is no longer subsidizing him.  Here is a list of his crimes against human rights.  It is his second conviction for mortgage fraud.

Who first predicted the mortgage crisis?

The Mortgager and Mortgagee differ the one from the other not more in length of purse, than the Jester and Jestee do in that of memory.  But in this the comparison between runs, as the scholiasts call it, upon all four; which, by the bye, is upon one or two legs more than some of the best of Homer's can pretend to; -- namely, That the one raises a sum and the other a laugh at your expense, and think no more about it.  Interest, however, still runs on in both cases; -- the periodical or accidental payments of it just serving to keep the memory of the affair alive; till, at length, in some evil hour, -- pop comes the creditor upon each, and by demanding principal upon the spot, together with full interest to the very day, makes them both feel the full extent of their obligations.

That is Laurence Sterne, from Tristram Shandy, chapter XII.

Summers Vindicated (again)

For the past week or so the newspapers have been trumpeting a new study showing no difference in average math ability between males and females.  Few people who have looked at the data thought that there were big differences in average ability but many media reports also said that the study showed no differences in high ability.

The LA Times, for example, wrote:

The study also undermined the assumption -- infamously espoused by former Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers in 2005 -- that boys are more likely than girls to be math geniuses.

Scientific American said:

So the team checked out the most gifted children. Again, no difference. From any angle, girls measured up to boys. Still, there’s a lack of women in the highest levels of professional math, engineering and physics. Some have said that’s because of an innate difference in math ability. But the new research shows that that explanation just doesn’t add up.

The Chronicle of Higher Education said:

The research team also studied if there were gender discrepancies at the highest levels of mathematical ability and how well boys and girls resolved complex problems. Again they found no significant differences.

All of these reports and many more like them are false.  In fact, consistent with many earlier studies (JSTOR), what this study found was that the ratio of male to female variance in ability was positive and significant, in other words we can expect that there will be more math geniuses and more dullards, among males than among females.  I quote from the study (VR is variance ratio):

Greater male variance is indicated by VR > 1.0. All VRs, by state and grade, are >1.0 [range 1.11 to 1.21].

Notice that the greater male variance is observable in the earliest data, grade 2.  (In addition, higher male VRS have been noted for over a century).  Now the study authors clearly wanted to downplay this finding so they wrote things like "our analyses show greater male variability, although the discrepancy in variances is not large."  Which is true in some sense but the point is that small differences in variance can make for big differences in outcome at the top.  The authors acknowledge this with the following:

If a particular specialty required mathematical skills at the 99th percentile, and the gender ratio is 2.0, we would expect 67% men in the occupation and 33% women. Yet today, for example, Ph.D. programs in engineering average only about 15% women.

So even by the authors' calculations you would expect twice as many men as women in engineering PhD programs due to math-ability differences alone (compare with the media reports above).  But what the author's don't tell you is that the gender ratio will get larger the higher the percentile.  Larry Summers in his infamous talk, was explicit about this point:

...if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean...But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out.

If you do the same type of calculation as the authors but now look at the expected gender ratio at 4 standard deviations from the mean you find a ratio of more than 3:1, i.e. just over 75 men for every 25 women should be expected at say a top-25 math or physics department on the basis of math ability alone (see the extension for details on my calculation).  Now does this explain everything that is going on?  I doubt it.  As Summers also pointed out it takes more than ability to become a professor at Harvard and if there are variance differences in characteristics other than ability (and there are) we can easily get a even larger expected gender ratio.

Does this mean that discrimination is not a problem?  Certainly not but we need the media and academia to accurately present the data on ability if we are to understand how large a role other issues may play.

Addendum: Andrew Gelman points out that perhaps alone among the media, Keith Winstein at the WSJ reported the story correctly.

----------

The authors show variance ratios of 1.11 to 1.21, I take a VR of 1.16.  If we set the female variance to 1 this implies the standard deviation for female ability is 1 and for male ability 1.077.  Using an online calculator for the Normal distribution you can find that given their standard deviation .0102% of males have ability of 4 or greater (4 female sds) but given their sd only .0032% of females can be expected to have the same level of ability, thus a gender ratio of 3.18.

Note that we are assuming that mathematical ability is normally distributed - we know the data fit this distribution around the mean but we don't know much about what happens at the very top.

Sherlock Holmes on prediction markets

"When you see a man with whiskers of that cut and the 'Pink 'un' protruding out of his pocket, you can always draw him by a bet," said he.  "I daresay that if I had put £100 down in front of him, that man would not have given me such complete information as was drawn from him by the idea that he was doing me on a wager.

That is from Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle and of course the link is added by yours truly.  The latest news from the prediction markets, by the way, is that the U.S. basketball team is given about a 75 percent chance of taking home the gold medal.

The cost of mortgage agency bailouts

I've read varying estimates of the cost of the mortgage bailout, including a sum of $1 trillion mentioned in The Wall Street Journal.  I have no idea what the number will be (and I'm not ruling out zero, or close to zero) but here is how to think about the costs:

1. Reimbursing agency debt holders is a transfer, not an economic cost.  No resources are destroyed by the reimbursement.

1b. The previous bad lending involves a cost -- in this case too many homes -- which already has been incurred.  This is not a cost of the bailout per se.

2. If government taxes the citizenry to raise money for the bailout, those taxes involve a deadweight loss.  Maybe 20 percent of revenue raised is a decent estimate of this cost.

3. Bailing out debt holders means that future lenders won't be as careful as they should be.  This problem dates from LTCM, or even further back, and it gets worse each time.  The result is excess leverage and leverage of the wrong kind, namely to "too big to fail" institutions, which then become even bigger and more leveraged.  I haven't seen a back of the envelope estimate of how much that really costs, much less a careful estimate, but this is a very important magnitude for calculating the net cost.

4. Often in these plans equity holders are (nearly) wiped out.  So beware all the talk of moral hazard.  The real moral hazard is on the side of future creditors, not the current, possibly-soon-to-be-extinguished equity holders.  They really are getting burned.

5. If the government dallies in executing the bailout, borrowing costs for the entire economy will rise.  A bailout has to be swift and decisive, assuming you want to do it.  Yet a swift and decisive bailout will likely involve errors of detail.

6. Doing a justified bailout this time makes it harder next time to avoid an unjustified bailout.  The bailout mentality is contagious in the political arena.

7. The transfer to the debt holders is generally regressive, at least under the likely assumption that the marginal taxpayers are less wealthy than the debt holders.  Of course some of the debt holders are foreign governments, which adds another element to the mix.

8. When it comes to the mortgage agencies, there is no real choice but to bail out the debt holders.  The alternative is a run on the dollar and collapse of faith in U.S. government securities and the end of the world.

Markets in everything, Japanese edition

The DVD is called Miteiru dake (Just Looking), and it features various talent/models just staring straight ahead. That’s right, the models on the DVD do very little other than stare straight at the camera. According to the website, the idea is to get young males who aren’t used to socializing with women to become more accustomed to making eye contact and/or handle the fact that a sentient being sits across from them and awaits interaction. The DVD hopes to cure those afflicted with shyness so that they may rejoin society.

Here is more information, with an embedded video at the link.  Thanks to Justin Mancinelli for the pointer.  Of course the market offers real variety:

The result, from what one can see on the website, is strangely disconcerting. A girl will stare back at you for an extended period of time, expressionless and periodically blinking (the blinks are eerily profound). Once in a while the model will utter a phrase like "ohayoo" (good morning) or make a move to say something, but for the most part there is just an uncomfortable silence. Most of the women on the DVD are jimusho-based talento (most have blogs on Ameba and other DVDs of their own to sell), but there are also foreign women, young girls, and older women thrown in the mix to give the viewer experience in handling long, uncomfortable silences with those of different races and ages.

C, a sampling

Charientism (n.) A rhetorical term to describe saying a disagreeable thing in an agreeable way

Compotation (n.) An episode of drinking or carousing together

Constult (v.) To act stupidly together

Again, that is from Ammon Shea's excellent book.

Why don't Americans like foreign movies?

Tyler Cowen...argues that movies are about familiarity. "A feeling of comfort has to be there" for a movie to succeed, he says. That is the reason that "Americans don't like foreign movies," Mr. Cowen says. A Bollywood movie with Indian cultural themes and actors sells tickets with the Subcontinent's three-million strong diaspora in the U.S., but not with the average American.

And will India embrace Hollywood?

...some predict that as India liberalizes, the movie landscape may alter. "If India becomes like Bangalore then more Indians will start watching Hollywood," Mr. Cowen explains, referring to the whiz-bang technology capital of India, populated by upper- and middle-class youth. As more Indians get wealthier, their tastes will reflect that currently exhibited only by the upper classes.

Here is the whole article, most of which is about Bollywood.  Here is earlier coverage on the same theme.

The economics of newspapers

The soon-to-be-working for the Center for American Progress Matt Yglesias writes:

The New York Times is known for its hard news coverage, but he observes that from a business perspective it's primarily a fashion and food publication that runs a small political news operation on the side. One issue of T Magazine, he says, pays for an entire NYT

And, of course, I would add that the broader logic of the internet is toward disaggregation of content -- the fact that newspapers cover such a wide array of content has to do with the economics of printing and distributing bundles of newsprint. In the future, fashion ads probably won't be able to cross-subsidize any bureaux anywhere. On the other hand, there may be a corrupting impact of some of this cross-subsidization -- I can't help but suspect that the importance of real estate advertising to papers may have distorted their coverage of the housing bubble on the way up.