Marginal Revolution

Assorted links

1. The ten highest earning authors; I like only one of them.

2. Chris Blattman and Michael Clemens on the long run.

3.The worst academic jobs around the world?

4. The difference between country music and rap music

5. Is there a need for "speed bankruptcy"? -- an analysis of the major plans

Assorted links

1. What could $700 billion buy in the developing world?

2. Nobel predictions, via Greg Mankiw

3. The crisis in pictures, via Chris F. Masse

4. Critique of Hubbard and Mayer

From the Hill

“The House of Representatives is currently experiencing an extraordinarily high amount of e-mail traffic. The Write Your Representative function is therefore intermittently available. While we realize communicating to your Members of Congress is critical, we suggest attempting to do so at a later time, when demand is not so high. System engineers are working to resolve this issue and we appreciate your patience.”

Here is the story.  The associated explanation is this:

The House is limiting e-mails from the public to prevent its websites from crashing due to the enormous amount of mail being submitted on the financial bailout bill.

Gee, I wonder if all those people are for or against the bailout?

I thank Carrie Conko for the pointer.

New York Times economics blog

There is a new one, find it here.  The writers include David Leonhardt and Catherine Rampell.  Hat tip to Tim Harford.

Assorted links

1. Jose Saramago starts blogging; here in Portuguese, here in Spanish.

2. The world's most expensive hotel rooms; via Craig Newmark

3. Milton Friedman YouTube video, from way back when with Milton at his peak.  Black and white, and thanks to Yana for the pointer.

4. 9-minute video of Julian Simon.

5. Frank Partnoy, financial prophet.

Growth and the real exchange rate

Dani Rodrik, who is back at blogging, also has a new paper.  Here is the abstract:

I provide evidence that undervaluation of the currency (a high real exchange rate) stimulates economic growth. This is true particularly for developing countries. There is also some evidence that the operative channel is the size of the tradable sector (especially industry). These …findings suggest that tradable goods suffer disproportionately from the government or market failures that keep poor countries from converging towards higher-income levels. I present two categories of explanations as to why this may be so, focusing on (a) institutional weaknesses, and (b) product-market failures. A formal model elucidates the linkages between the level of the real exchange rate and the rate of economic growth.

No, mercantilism has not made a comeback.  Public choice economics has.  The most plausible mechanism is that most poor countries have dysfunctional interest groups.  Exporters are a relatively growth-enhancing set of interest groups.  So if your policies favor exporters, the quality of your interest groups will increase over time.  Your policy will stay good or get better and your growth will go up.  In other words, what Toyota wants is pretty good for Japan.  China's hope is that its new businessmen want to keep some modicum of freedom, and so on.

Of course low real exchange rates trickle away over time, as domestic prices rise and markets restore the real exchange rate of their choice.  But low real exchange rates are probably a good proxy for other export-friendly policies, such as predictable regulation and investment in infrastructure.  And so low real exchange rates are only doing part of the work in driving growth and probably not even the biggest part.  If we had an index of "export friendliness" for the countries in this sample, maybe the power of the low real exchange rate would go away.  This explains why wealthier countries, who don't have dysfunctional interest groups to the same degree, also don't see comparable growth benefits from low real exchange rates.  Rodrik even points out on pp.14-15 that the countries with the worst governance indices see the biggest growth gain from low real exchange rates.  (By the way, in the public choice story the improvements in the quality of your interest groups and in your policy don't come until later and thus they are not captured in the current level of the quality of governance index.)

Brad DeLong comments here and here and here.

Assorted links

1. How to judge a popular book in 90 seconds or less.  It usually takes me less than five.

2. Does InTrade have a Republican bias?

3. The most overpaid actors and actresses?

4. Douglas Holtz-Eakin on taxes: the truth.

5. My colleague Dan Rothschild has a new blog covering Ike and Houston.

6. An awful Op-Ed.

New rankings of economics blogs

Via Econbrowser, but of course such rankings are not very scientific.

Assorted links

1. Via Craig Newmark, a short class on behavioral economics (are the speakers or the audience more impressive?)

2. List of very good contemporary TV shows

3. Diasyrmus

4. The first Haitian opera (to buy it, right click on "shop" and then click on the Dutch phrase at the bottom of the page)

5. Nursing home reform I can favor.

6. Which three Senators receive the most Fannie Mae money?

Is this a sustainable business model?

Alternatively, you could call this "Markets in Everything":

The secret-spilling site Wikileaks announced this week that it's acquired thousands of e-mails belonging to a top aide to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. But don't look for them online. In a departure from its full-disclosure past, Wikileaks is auctioning off the cache to the highest bidder.

Wikileaks began soliciting bids from media organizations on Tuesday, for what it describes as thousands of e-mails and attachments from 2005 to 2008 that provide insight into Chavez's management, CIA activities in Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolution.

The winner gets exclusivity and embargoed access to the documents, though Wikileaks will publish all of them eventually.

Here is more.

Assorted links

1. Website about airline food, via Yan Li

2. The economics of amniocentesis

3. Arnold Kling has an important update

4. Women and hot cars, etc. -- what science has to say

Assorted links

1. ATBC reaps national applause

2. Fringe, starting soon

3. Standard of living and growth issues, from Robert Samuelson.

4. Volume II of Deirdre McCloskey's work in progress.

Assorted links

1. Anarchism and Justice, by Roy A. Childs, or at least part of it.  Here is more related material, all via David Boaz.

2. Joe Nocera on The Wall Street Journal.

3. Peter Leeson guest blogs for Freakonomics; I very much like his first post on UFOs.

4. New "ideas blog" at NYT; a nice try and it may get better but it still lacks a voice.

5. Bus reform in Santiago: a sad story.

6. Is commitment-phobia genetic?

Assorted links

1. Tim Groseclose, muckraking hero.  Here's follow-up coverage from Eugene Volokh.  Here is the Groseclose report.

2. The wisdom of John V

3. Economist Simon Patten on brevity

4. Africa map of the day

5. Was Wikipedia ahead of the betting markets?

Cowen-Hanson Bloggingheads topics

To paraphrase my good friend: Robin Hanson and I, good friends who sometimes blog-spar, will tape a bloggingheads TV show this Monday.  What would folks like us to talk about? 

Here are the answers from Robin's readers.

Assorted links

1. Deep Glamour, a new Virginia Postrel blog, linked to a forthcoming Virginia Postrel book

2. Videos of Nobel Laureates, recent talks

3. Beware what ye do not know, namely peanut butter 

4. Robert Solow takes down Kevin Phillips

5. Smash of Paul Theroux

Zero-price Markets in everything: "Fake following"

Jason Kottke reports:

This is a little bit genius. One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is "fake following". That means you can friend someone but you don't see their updates. That way, it appears that you're paying attention to them when you're really not. Just like everyone does all the time in real life to maintain their sanity. Rex calls it "most important feature in the history of social networks" and I'm inclined to agree. It's one of the few new social features I've seen that makes being online buddies with someone manageable and doesn't just make being social a game or competition.

Assorted links

1. Why don't all peoples form neat, orderly lines?

2. Japan will label carbon footprints for many items

3. Charles Mann, on our eroding supply of dirt and the economics of soil.  I am a big fan of Mann (he wrote the superb 1491) and this is one of the best magazine pieces of this year if not the best.  On top of all the good economics in this piece, learn how the "black revolution" -- putting carbon in the soil -- may solve agricultural problems and alleviate global warming at the same time.  Hat tip to Kottke.

4. The latest: "Chile's lower house of congress has suspended plans to boost a $1,626 gasoline subsidy for each of its members."

5. Vegan-libertarian debate and discussion

6. The new Neil Stephenson book

Assorted links

1. The book boyfriend

2. Should you laugh at UFO research?

3. Is there excess conformity in economics?

4. A new theory of the genetic origins of homosexuality

Eric Posner is now blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy

Eric is very, very smart and knows lots of economics.  Here is his first post; excerpt:

The busy international legal activity that occurred during the post-Cold War era – the establishment of international courts, the involvement of the Security Council, the advance of international trade law – will slow down and perhaps even reenter the deep freeze into which it was shunted during the Cold War. The irony is that liberal internationalism could advance only as long as the United States was the sole superpower and in the mood to advance it.

Assorted links

1. David Leonhardt has a long, thoughtful article on the economic thinking of Barack Obama.

Request for requests

What would you like to hear about?  What questions do you have?  No promises are made, but your chances can only go up.

Three more links from Atacama

1. Profile of Art DeVany, via Michael Blowhard.

2. Another excellent David Brooks column: "The System is Winning."

3. Are dreams more negatively biased than reality?

Assorted links

1. The latest in resale price maintenance

2. Paul Krugman's (unfinished) reading list for international

3. New physics blog, via Razib

4. Lengthy article on Bob Barr

5. The cost of getting ready

Assorted links

1. Six tips for enjoying a vacation, from Gretchen Rubin.  I endorse them all including the point about the almonds.

2. I never tire of reading about quantum weirdness.

3. Via Andrew Sullivan, American cities in the 1950s; beautiful photos.

4. The war on drugs, continued.  This article should be a sobering wake-up for many people.

Assorted links

1. Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, edited by Ronald Hamowy, Amazon link here.

2. Cato forum on global warming; I have yet to read this.  Here is my response to an earlier article by Manzi.

3. No way; not at all plausible.  No way.

4. For sanity on all matters Georgian, check out Matt Yglesias at his new blog location.

Assorted links

1. How artists work

2. Oil and the dollar

3. Where Argentina is headed

4. China restaurant name of the day

5. Markets in everything, China style (food again, photos)

Assorted links

1. West Side Story: the truth

2. Discover your gender, using the web

3. Backyard nukes?  A scary joke, or is it?

4. Quantum mechanics gets even weirder

5. Business cycles: the current frontier

6. Measuring the value of NBA players

Pure signaling

Yesterday developer Armin Heinrich posted an iPhone app to the App Store called I Am Rich. The program displays a red gem, has no function but to display your wealth to others through ownership, and costs $1000. It has since been removed from the App Store, although no one knows whether Apple or Heinrich pulled it.

Here is more.

The most obnoxious blogger in the world

I read many blogs but there is only one -- of the two or three hundred I have sampled -- which I find truly obnoxious.  I find the content obnoxious and I find the style obnoxious and I find the blogger obnoxious.  By the way, I don't think it is a blog which has ever said anything negative about me, at least not that I'm aware of.  And it's not a blog on the blogroll or a blog I have, as far as I can remember, linked to.   

I never read it regularly in the first place, but I don't think I can stand to read this blog any more ever again.  Even so, I try to spin theories of how one blog and one blog only can have achieved such a special place in my mind.  It's not a blog that covers special or unique topics, relative to the other blogs I read and link to.  Is the world not a continuum?

If you are a blogger you can know that the chance I find you obnoxious is very slim indeed.  But not zero.

Or maybe you all think that I just don't read enough blogs.

Assorted links

1. Arnold Kling on Shiller's new book.

2. What music shows about your teen; in my view you want your kid to like indie rock.

3. Do socially dominant males stay in the gene pool?  Maybe not.

4. How to test new search engines.

5. Go for it!: the Google test for any human choice.

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!

Assorted links

1. Leopard vs. crocodile

2. How easy is it to disappear?

3. "Lifestreaming"

4. The real Panopticon?: "Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen and Alan B. Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion."

Happiness interview with Gretchen Rubin

You'll find it here; she is my BlogLand friend and her writings are always interesting.

Assorted links

1. America's hot new restaurant

2. Incentives work, n = 1 (and now n=2)

3. The Milky Way; it loads a little slowly but it's worth it

4. Markets in everything: death tourism

Assorted links

1. Fifty outstanding translations, via Bookslut.

2. The cost of being Batman, via www.geekpress.com

3. More on the file-sharing controversy

4. The new "Big Mac" index, so to speak

5. An economic theory of excess defensiveness

Assorted links

1. Megan Non-McArdle is blogging again, at rhubarbpie.  Here is her post on which are the lovable women.

2. Markets in everything: a restaurant with a menu for dogs (but how can they afford it?)

3. Star Wars according to a three year old, a short YouTube video via Yana

4. The water shortage myth

All Tyler, All the Time

The tyler-city blog is a computer generated blog of gibberish meant solely to generate links (can readers explain the economics?).  It is drawn from all over, including quite a bit from Marginal Revolution.  It's gibberish but as Tyler might say even a million monkeys occasionally generate some very good sentences.  Here are a few, I've provide links but please don't encourage them too much.

I thought both were tyler cogent, for quite complex topics.

The Ton Ball That Keeps The Taipei tyler Tolerant Is Pretty

and it is good to know that "besides his many talents, Tyler was also a really nice kid."  But my favorite posting is this one:

Small steps toward a much better tyler.

Assorted links

1. Via Bookslut, check out the Walter Benjamin book cover (scroll down a tiny bit).

2. Are CD boxed sets disappearing?

3. Price discrimination

4. New libertarian and right-wing blog on culture, YeahRight.

5. The carbon tax in our future, details revealed.

Competition for my ethnic dining guide

Yet another [new iPhone program], Urbanspoon, is “a cross between a magic eight ball and a slot machine:" you shake the phone, and it randomly displays the name of a good restaurant nearby, using the iPhone’s G.P.S. and motion sensor.

Here is a longer review of the new iPhone.

Assorted links

1. Be skeptical of medians.

2. The pattern recognition theory of humor, via GeekPress.com.

3. AmateurEconomist, a new on-line magazine.

4. Victor Niederhoffer on worry; see the comments for a partial summary of my talk.

5. A superb post on charity, from Freakonomics blog.

Has "The Long Tail" been refuted?

Prof. [Anita] Elberse looked at data for online video rentals and song purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people shop online are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only do hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the evidence suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow, not shrink.

Here is the summary article.  Here is the Elberse paper.  Here is Chris Anderson's response.  Overall I cannot call this one for Elberse.  If you take a genre as given, the web looks less revolutionary but part of the long tail is the creation of new genres.  We have blogs now, for instance, and we didn't fifteen years ago, even though blog readership is quite concentrated among the top sites.  Or maybe the "Quickflix rental distribution" isn't so skewed to the left (the least-rented titles aren't so popular) but where were Quickflix, Netflix, and other such services fifteen years ago? 

Static estimation by deciles and related measures is often misleading since in part the "long tail" effect is to make the top deciles thicker than before, not necessarily to raise the status of the bottom decile relative to the top.  In his response, Chris Anderson nails this point:

The best example of this is in what she describes as a growing "concentration" of sales around a relatively small number of blockbuster titles. In the Rhapsody data, she finds, the top 10% of titles (out of more than a million in that data sample) accounted for 78% of all plays, and the top 1% account for 32% of all plays. That sounds pretty concentrated around the head, until you reflect, as she notes, that "one percent of a million is still 10,000--[...]equal to the entire music inventory of a typical Wal-Mart store."

Nor does showing that most of the sales are in the top of the distribution refute the claim.  Arguably it is the middle tail which is suffering and the long tail, and the best sellers, are growing in import.  That seems compatible with Anderson's core thesis.  The long tail hypothesis may be oversold but the data in the Elberse piece don't really dent it.

Elberse wants to define the Long Tail hypothesis as claiming there is more money to be made in the niches than in the blockbusters; while I believe you might find a quotation to that effect from Chris Anderson the more general idea is simply how important the niches are becoming.  Elberse concedes a lot at one point:

It is undeniable that online commerce has significantly broadened customers’ access to products of all varieties, including the most obscure. However, my findings suggest that it would be imprudent for companies to upend traditional practice and focus on the demand for obscure products.

You could have rewritten that as "The Long Tail hypothesis is basically true, just don't sell to the Long Tail alone."  On that we should all be able to agree.

China markets in everything fact of the day

A Chinese man who set up an online business selling dead mosquitoes says he's received 10,000 orders in just two days.

Nin Nan, of Shanghai, came up with the idea of selling mosquitoes he killed to attract visitors to his online jewellery shop.

"I locked myself in the room, thinking hard of a promotion plan. With a 'pa' sound and a dead mosquito, I came up with this weird idea," he told Qianlong News.

Nin sells his mosquito corpses for six yuan - about 45p - each. His ad reads: "Truly killed by human hands. Can be used for science studies, decoration, and collection."

Here is the story, and thanks to Allison for the pointer.

Assorted links

1. How bad will things get?  A symposium.

2. How smart is the octopus?

3. Single-factor Gaussian copula.

4. Avner Greif responds to critics.

5. "Stairway to Heaven" revenues: one guesstimate is $562 million.  And they don't even put it on iTunes.

Assorted links

1. The world's top twenty public intellectuals?  Lots of Muslims make this list.

2. Let readers rank the bias of news stories, using a digg.com approach.

3. Alan Wolfe on Bruno Frey, Dan Ariely, and behavioral economics; a thoughtful essay.

4. Megan McArdle on Roissy.

5. Ten more stunning bridges.

RSS queries

As many of you know I am anti-RSS but I would like to understand the phenomenon better.  So I have a few questions for you.  What feature in an RSS reader do you not have but long for?  What would cause you to switch from one reader to another?  Would you ever consider a reader that forced ads on you, bundled up with the delivered post?

Don't worry, we're not planning or even contemplating changes in our RSS feed, I simply would like to learn.

Assorted links

1. Something else happens, via Bruce Charlton

2. "Civil War," an excellent new paper by Chris Blattman and Edward Miguel

3. Convenience yield, an excellent introduction; by the way Jeffrey Williams is a good author on the intuitive properties of futures and forward markets as they relate to storage.

4. The Japanese equivalent of the Hummer.

5. How to hire new people, by Auren Hoffman

6. Whose incomes are growing riskier?  It's only about five percent of the distribution.

Assorted links

1. Rules of successful consulting, via Craig Newmark.

2. U. Chicago's new Milton Friedman Center.

3. An anti-shyness drug?  And it is backed by at least one economist, namely Paul Zak.

4. Pele robbed at gunpoint, in Santos, Brazil.

5. Advice on...how to give advice.

6. Tomorrow Museum.

China Fact of the Day

I was just speaking with an expert on the Chinese banking and finance system and I asked him what were the major problems with the Chinese banking system.  He replied, "Well, housing prices are falling and many banks have bad loans and if prices fall much further the borrowers won't have the money to pay the loans back."  I kid you not. 

Also, contra the U.S. the Chinese Central Bank is reducing the growth in the money supply to combat inflation.  Interesting times.

The King Monopolist

At the "Silk Market" in Beijing you can buy high quality goods from "Chanel," "Gucci," "Ralph Lauren" and just about any other famous brand.  Prices are very, very low ;).  But there is one brand that no one copies and for which you must pay full price - the 2008 Olympics brand.  It's not good to offend the King monopolist.   

Assorted links

1. Seth Roberts on why people touch their mouths

2. Blogging vs. writing, an excellent piece

3. "Eternal, Maiden, Actualization," hat tip goes to my mother (hi mom!)

4. Interview with the very fetching Steven Pinker

5. Yes, medicine is backwards

Assorted links

1. What makes Jeff Koons great; the best parts of this insightful article come in the middle and toward the end.

2. Dani Rodrik on Samuelson-Stolper and why it might not hold.

3. Wealth of Nations board game; it seems to emphasize the imperialist reading of Adam Smith.  There is more information here.

4. Movies are getting longer.

5. The cap and trade bill fails.

Google bidding games -- markets in everything?

What would happen if MicroSoft or Yahoo or a MicroHoo went to the 5 top results for the top 25k searches and paid them to leave the Google Index?

A theoretical maximum of 125k sites, but with overlap, probably closer to 100k or less, times how much per site on average?

The math starts to get interesting. At $1,000 per site average times 100k sites, thats only $1 Billion Dollars. The distribution would obviously favor the larger sites, so of that billion dollars, would the top 1k sites take 500k each and the remaining 99k split the rest?

Given the stakes, why stop at $1 Billion Dollars ? Would the top 1k most visited sites take a cool $1mm each, plus a commitment from Microsoft or Yahoo to drive traffic through their search engines to more than make up for the lost Google Traffic. After all, once consumers realized that Google no longer had valid search results for the top 25k searchs, that traffic would most likely go to Microsoft and Yahoo...

What would it cost to get that number of sites to turn Google off and stay off, and would the traffic created as users switch from Google more than compensate for the cost?

Or would Google recognize the risk and jump in and offer more to websites to stay?

That's Mark Cuban, but I say no.  Is there any precedent for successfully undermining a popular "monopoly" (in this case a free one) by paying the input suppliers to go take a hike?  If bidding ever did get underway (unlikely), those suppliers are worth more to the relatively efficient company, which is probably Google and they are certainly less liquidity constrained than just about anybody else. 

Yes, Google does reap profit from the free content supplied to the web, but the chance of content suppliers colluding to keep reap more of those gains are small.  If anything the relevant externality is that Google could pay for gated content to be accessible to search engines but I wouldn't bet on that happening either.

Assorted links

1. China Law of the Day: forced to visit your parents

2. What do we know about innovation?

3. Data from Wellsley; could be better, could be worse.

4. Barack Obama names the very excellent Jason Furman to be Director of Economic Policy.

Assorted links

1. A very long palindrome

2. Francisco Marroquin university in Guatemala

3. What percent of NBA athletes are broke five years after retirement?  Sixty.

4. The Japanese put bar codes on tombstones.  Guess why?

Where Pretty Lies Perish

Should I, if only for didactic purposes, ever link to EVIL websites?  Since Michael Blowhard directed my attention to Roissy I've been facing this dilemma again.  Not only won't I link to him but I have to put this unsalubrious and indeed embarrassing discussion under the fold...

Roissy promotes an aggressively instrumentalist view of the sexes; imagine Larry David as a scoreman plus make the language of the monologues ruder and more offensive.  He also thinks like an economist and uses marginalism: "Smells bad. (when a shower isn’t going to help your cause, why bother?)"

My question is which parameter value he incorrectly estimates; after all, he is not just evil he is also imprudent in missing the joys of monogamy and matrimony.  I believe that most of all, he underestimates his transparency to his observers in real life.  I sometimes call this the endogeneity of face to thought and thus his face must be somewhat evil too.  Since his strategies cause him to spend time only with women he can fool, he doesn't correctly perceive how he is wrecking his broader reputation; the same is probably true for the rest of us as well.    

(But IS he evil?  Is there not a theorem which suggests that rule-governed sweet young things will in fact overinvest in the rule and, if you could selectively induce "rule disengagement," human welfare might rise?  But no...that theorem was refuted some time ago.)

Can he still be saved by a good woman?  Indeed there are so many good women out there and yet not one has saved him to date.  If only he would read Henry James's "Beast in the Jungle."

Poor Roissy.  Poor, poor Roissy.  Here's his advice for much older men who wish to attract 25-year-old women:

Bear in mind that younger women (barring a few notable golddigger exceptions) are not as practical as older women. They are more whimsical, flirty, passionate, and romantic, and this means you will get more mileage having a youthful outlook, being recklessly spontaneous, maintaining a high level of energy, and focusing on the emotional connections, than you would tempting them with the allure of financial stability and security.

Assorted links

1. On Hayek's Road to serfdom, via Megan McArdle.

2. Boston Review symposium on Africa, very good.

3. Will Wilkinson continues his excellence.

4. The world's most impressive subways and yes Tokyo is #1.

5. Extended version of BSG interview with Ron Moore, interesting throughout.

Assorted links

1. Razib reviews When Histories Collide, another mega-history of economic growth.

2. The New Zealand legalization of prostitution seems to have gone OK.  The longer report is here.

3. Absolute hot (very safe for work).

4. I Am Neurotic

Podcast with Robin Hanson

Self-recommending, I don't even have to listen (the audio would wake a sleeping Natasha, though it seems my typing does not) to know it is great.

Growthology

That's the new blog from Tim Kane and Bob Litan, both of whom are very good economists.  The pointer comes from the blogroll of EconLog.

Assorted links

1. Own-to-rent: not a good idea

2. More scoop on Romergate

3. The Transparent Society, ten years later

4. Blogging as therapy

5. Why might academics be less happy?

Donald C, Lavoie, intellectual father of the econoblogosphere

Don Lavoie taught at GMU many years before he passed away in 2001.  Most of Don's work was in comparative systems and central planning, but in the early to mid 90s he spent a few years investigating hypertext.  Don claimed that someday economics would be written in linkable, annotatable form, rather than on paper.  Economics, in his Gadamer-drenched view, would become one big giant conversation rather than a series of isolated papers.  Here is one snippet of his views.  For a few years he talking about the idea non-stop.

At the time I thought he was crazy.

Links

1. GMU Econ Society blog

2. Top ten Jackie Chan fight scenes?: How can they leave off Jackie against the monks?

3. More on speculation and oil prices as a bubble; very thoughtful analysis

4. Solving the climate change attitude mystery

5. Does religion make people happy?

New assorted links

1. Boltzmann brains, via Brad DeLong and here

2. Rest and home court advantage, and here

3. My old colleague Charles Lave has passed away

4. The Antiplanner blog

5. Reminiscenses of Richard Rorty, via MY

6. New science fiction TV shows coming from J.J. Abrams and Joss Wheedon

What are the benefits of being full professor?

Dan Drezner, who just won the title (congratulations!), gives a list.  Oddly he leaves off the most important (only?) benefit, namely that no one can tell you any more that you won't make full professor.  I know that sounds silly but in essence you choke off the ability of your university to send you one very particular negative status signal.  Nor can they hold that threat over your head.

Sometimes I think this is also a benefit of being married.  Let's say you and your significant other are not married.  In that case proposing, and having that proposal turned down, often causes couples to split up.  By marrying you remove this scenario as the source of a possible split.

There are advantages to sitting at the very top and very bottom of status distributions; it is often the in-between spots that are problematic.

Assorted links

1. It hurts to be poor

2. The Bastiat Prize for free-market journalism

3. The 1949 Phillips machine restored

4. Dilbert starts the Economics Party

Assorted links

1. Megan Non-McArdle quits blogging, at least for the time being. 

I've long felt that the routine of married life fits the routine of blogging very well; I really do wake up the same hour each morning, more or less.  If I weren't married I would still blog but I would feel more conflicted about it and perhaps she does too.  ("You're funnier on the blog" one loyal (and beautiful) MR reader once told me upon meeting.)  Dating and blogging either means the blog is a secret (but for how long?) or the potential partner "dates the blog" before dating you.  Do I really want to be explaining "Markets in Everything" on a first or second date?  ("No, I don't want you as a prostitute.  Most of the entries are sad, or satirical, but there is a secret code to indicate the ones I approve of.  For further explanation, go to the middle chapter in Montaigne's second book of Essays.")  Maybe the blog is more charming than I am and I would do better to send it on my dates but that's still an odd place to be.  In any case my guess is that Megan Non-McArdle is doing the right thing by quitting.  We all wish Megan Non- well in her quest for Mr. Non-McArdle, and in her quest for everything else, etc.

Assorted links

1. Interesting arguments against a carbon tax

2. What are the longest drives on Google Maps?

3. Who is Lane Kenworthy?

4. Gas tax incidence

Markets in everything

Coprolite.  It's cheaper than fossils, for obvious reasons.

Back of the envelope

Is Wikipedia just the beginning?  Clay Shirky has turned off his TV and gotten down to work:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.  I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching?  Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.  Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

I thank Jules Sigall for the pointer.

Assorted links

1. The value of the marginal kid

2. New Mideast edition of the FT

3. Does resource wealth lead to tyranny?

4. Virginia Postrel and Grant McCracken on plagiarism and Virginia again

5. Is the "Great Filter" ahead us or behind us: Nick Bostrom roots against life on Mars

Assorted links

1. The emancipatory power of the American hotel

2. The ideological migration of Christopher Hitchens

3. What do we understand about recessions?, by Bob Hall, via Mark Thoma

4. What should the World Bank know about governance?, starring Acemoglu, Rodrik, North, Fukuyama and others

5. When learning by example backfires

6. Update on auction-rate securities

The Countercyclical Asset, part II

During a recent book interview, an ABC news anchor asked me what kind of impact the real world's subprime mortgage crisis and related fallout would have on Second Life's economy.  I speculated that it would probably provide an ironic boost, noting how the last recession of 2003 was important to Second Life's early growth.  "I can't tell you how many people I met then," I told her, "who were out-of-work programmers and web designers creating content in SL while they looked for jobs." 

That was an off-the-cuff answer, but the latest economic figures from Linden Lab suggest a similar pattern may indeed be happening now.  In-world spending activity has been increasing steadily since the mid-2007 prohibition against virtual gambling.  "The Second Life economy," Zee Linden noted, "does not appear to be affected by the slowing economy of the United States."  SL blogger Roland Legrand took a look at the numbers, and had a similar thought to me: "Could it be that people find refuge from the 'real world' troubles in virtual worlds and that the SL economy 'profits' in that way from the crisis?" 

Here is the link.  Here is the first installment of The Countercyclical Asset.

Request for requests

Comments are open, so please let us know what you are interested in reading about.  The only promise is that of weak monotonicity, namely that your mention won't lower the chance of the topic being covered.

Assorted links

1. Don't fire John Yoo

2. Income inequality, from Greg Mankiw

3. How much appearing on Colbert helps your book

4. India's "brain gain"

Assorted links

1. Tim Harford and Dan Ariely, mano a mano on Amazon

2. Utah baby names

3. Money does buy happiness; the ongoing collapse of the Easterlin paradox

4. New video game detects your brain waves

Markets in everything

How much is a Twitter account with nearly 1,500 followers worth? Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron wants to find out, and launches a publicity stunt that will spark a debate about trust and privacy: He’s selling his Twitter account, including the followers.

Here is the full story, and thanks to Chewxy for the pointer.  And here is how to custom-order jeans on Second Life.

Assorted links

1. Using TiVo fast forwards to predict American Idol winners.

2. An optimistic view of the mortgage market.

3. John Rawls on the superiority of baseball; recall I once described him as the least Hansonian thinker ever.

4. The legacy of Milton Friedman; Brad DeLong comments.

5. Does foreign occupation really cause suicide bombing?

Assorted links

1. Why Messiaen is important

2. The demise of the semi-colon?

3. Jason Furman on fixing our fiscal problems

4. More proposals for limiting chess draws

Assorted links

1. Soccer and violence

2. Satire of a Tyler Cowen book review, via Bamber

3. Japanese barcodes, via David Zetland

4. Leonhard Euler, via www.geekpress.com

Assorted links

1. The end of the Irish miracle?

2. Are SWFs smaller than you think?

3. Local government isn't always better

4. Do you vote differently if you have daughters?

5. New blog on water economics

Assorted links

1. Conformal projections, hat tip to this excellent new blog

2. Who really won the socialist calculation debate?

3. Assigning the blame for subprime mortgage problems

4. We are risk averse like bonobos; in contrast chimps love risk

5. Does capitalism spur cooperation?

6. Love and books

Is religion for controlling men?

Razib writes:

The researchers' hypothesis was that in religious kibbutzim men would be better collaborators (and thus would take less) than women, while in secular kibbutzim men and women would take about the same. And that was exactly what happened.

Here is more, interesting throughout.

Assorted links

1. Crisis vs. recession.  Via Felix Salmon, here is a wise account from India, it is still likely to be true.

2. Are tips discriminatory against African-Americans?

3. Money does make you happy -- if you give it away (via Jacqueline Passey)

4. The economics of Gawker bloggers

Assorted links

1. This is not a Belgium

2. How to focus in clutch moments

3. Is the Riemann hypothesis being solved?  More here, on de Branges (gated, but excerpted in the comments section).

4. The latest books on happiness

Assorted links

1. Greg Clark on China and Arrighi

2. Economists study African-American women

3. New futures/options on non-farm payroll

4. Gambler sues bookmaker after losing his money

5. Markets in everything: a whole radio channel devoted to Spitzer news

6. The raid on UC Berkeley?

Many thanks to readers for these pointers...

Assorted links

1. What makes people give?, by David Leonardt

2. Richard Sandor's Climate Exchange

3. Will there be a big intervention to support the dollar?

4. Watch old Star Treks on-line