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Assorted links
1. "Realization utility," by me, for Money magazine.
2. Pick two.
3. The Baseline Scenario, a new web site.
4. Markets in everything: chav-free holidays?
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 28, 2009 at 12:36 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
On the chav-free holidays bit, I love the handwringing in the UK that accompanies anything class-related.
Compare that to our egalitarian, Brave New World-ish society where everyone now happily detests classes other than their own. Except the upper income left, I suppose, who enjoys getting outraged on the behalf of others; but even that's treated as just something inherent to the NPR class and nothing to get worked up over...
Posted by: JackTrade at Jan 28, 2009 1:20:14 PM
The analogous U.S. offering would be a tour in which your fellow travelers would be named Aiden and Sophia instead of Tyrone and Laquisha.
Posted by: Scott at Jan 28, 2009 3:37:20 PM
Candyland teaches kids how to stack a deck, much easier to do and to get away with than manipulating dice.
Posted by: lw at Jan 28, 2009 4:35:07 PM
Off-topic: Tyler, any comments on John Updike? If you are a fan, what book do you recommend for someone who has never read him?
Posted by: Diogo at Jan 28, 2009 4:50:02 PM
I'd pay extra for a holiday free of chavs. Hell, I have paid extra to go to beach resorts where I was less likely to encounter drunken, foul-mouthed anti-social boors.
Idiocracy may have been a prescient movie, but I have no wish to live it, yet.
Posted by: bartman at Jan 28, 2009 7:21:41 PM
Tyler, I enjoyed your article on "realization utility," but it seems that the stock market is a bad example. For too-quick buying or too-late selling to make any difference, one must know something that the market does not, which is implausible for an casual investor. Better to assume, I think, that the the expected returns for the recent winner and the recent loser are equal.
Posted by: blink at Jan 28, 2009 10:31:33 PM
Tyler, did you intend to put a great deal of emphasis on the spouse in your article?
Posted by: mpkomara at Jan 29, 2009 2:08:58 AM
Blink makes a good point, but it's also true that casual investors who actively buy and sell shares are doing so for kicks, even if they do not always fully admit that to themselves. If you're the kind of person who believes that all shares have similar expected returns as far as you can judge, you wouldn't be buying, selling or reading Money magazine at all.
Posted by: Zamfir at Jan 29, 2009 4:11:09 AM
In the Money Magazine piece, Tyler writes: "Even buy-and-hold investors sometimes need to admit they shouldn't have bought the darned shares in the first place." Fair enough; and if you bought it at $10/share and it's now worth $1, you'd have to be brain-dead not to "admit" this. But that doesn't mean you should *sell* your shares. For the buy-and-hold investor, no stock "looks [especially] likely to fall further." He takes the same view of all stocks, and so will (rightly, in my view) ignore this advice: "you should push yourself to look at [your dogs] more critically than you normally would." Of course, he won't sell his winners (if any), either.
And why wouldn't one's spouse berate him for *unrealized* losses?
Posted by: Philo at Jan 29, 2009 12:56:35 PM
