Public economics
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Once again, Tom Vanderwell here with some thoughts about moral hazard....Barry Ritholz at The Big Picture had these two comics that brought to the forefront again the issue of moral hazard. Check out the comics and then we'll talk "on...
Bloomberg columnist John Berry is the dean of currency commentators, so when he has something strong to say, people notice (whether they agree or disagree). Berry has been downbeat about the U.S. dollar for some time, but in his current column...
Hey, some of economics actually does work in the real world: People apparently do respond to price incentives … By Monday, oil and gasoline futures prices had given up all of the gain they'd experienced since Katrina. Today we learned...
What is the role of unversities in technology commercialization? Some starry-eyed sorts persist in believing that universities should “return to” tossing things over the transom, no economic intererest inherent or implied. That, in essence, is the naive thrust of a...
While most chatter in the popular press is about the prospects for a "super-spike" in oil prices, count on the Economist for a contrarian view:Julian West of CERA, an energy consultancy, has compiled a list of all of the oil...
According to this morning's WSJ, controversial FCC Chair Michael Powell is going to surprise folks by stepping down today:Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell plans to resign today, ending what's often been a controversial tenure as he tried to push...
Jared "Guns, Germs, and Steel" Diamond has an essay/editorial in today's NY Times. While it is essentially a precis of his new book ("Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed"), the thoughts are mind-expanding:Maya Native Americans of the Yucatan...
The Bank of International Settlements has a neat paper out looking at the question of whether Japanese real estate investors knew they were in a bubble in the 1980s. Some might say, How could they not have known? After all,...
There is old saying in the forecasting business that if you have to predict, predict often. Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach apparently lives by a strange variant of that adage, one wherein you repeatedly predict the same thing, even if it...
From the front of today's Financial Times:...
To borrow the title of Frances Cairncross's estimable book, the death of distance is a fact. As the Economist points out in its current issue, falling transport costs have been a fact over the decades, and that has lead to...
I somehow missed MIT economist Morris Adelman's fun paper in Regulation this Spring, but I spotted it recently on SSRN. To make a well-done paper undeservedly shorter, he argues provocatively that there is no oil crisis and has never been...
In its current issue Fortune magazine argues rightly that the interstate highway system was one of the primary forces that helped create the modern U.S. economy. The magazine has an interesting photo essay that it uses in making the case....
In yesterday's NY Times Virginia Postrel highlighted a recent game-theory economics paper that looked into why Republicans and Democrats were so far apart on religious issues, rather than racing to the middle as political theory predicts. In essence, the paper...
There is an interesting new study on the economics effects of music downloading out from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Here is the summary:Recording industry revenue has fallen sharply in the last three years, and some -- but...
Tom Frank was never destined to be a normal intellectual. Despite having a Ph.D. in cultural history from the University of Chicago, his one attempt at a university faculty job apparently ended in a sort of Barbara Walters moment having...
Josh Lerner's new book "Innovation and its Discontents" on the problems with patent policy is very good. I've just finished it, and it is a thoughtful look at a sometime MEGO subject, one remarkably free of both cant and of...
How many technology-related monthly bills are you paying? Cell phone, Tivo, XM radio, etc. etc. For many people this is becoming not insignificant. A generation ago people made three monthly payments -- mortages, utilities, and newspapers -- and now the...
The WSJ highlights some interesting findings from a recent Sphere Institute report:More than half of the people working at technology companies in California in early 2000 had left the technology field or the state by the end of 2003, and...
I am a fan of electronic markets. I find that I turn to them more and more, whether the subject is the likelihood of an FOMC rate increase in November, or where the S&P 500 will end the year, or...
Remarkable stuff: Even the inflation-adjusted comparison is getting more impressive. While we aren't quite at the 1981 peak, we aren't that far off any more either:...
The first few paras from my column in tomorrow's National Post on the the Oracle antitrust decision:Game on! A U.S. District Court has ruled against the U.S. Department of Justice in its antitrust case against Oracle. The decision will set...
Dell and Gateway have apparently stopped including floppy drives in new computers. So here is the question: What took so long? You can't store diddly in 1.44MB, so that's not the pitch, and it hasn't been for some time. It strikes...
Why don't more stores have a single line that feeds all the registers? Banks do it, airlines do it, and Barnes & Noble does it, but other stores seem torn. As this nicely-done WashPost piece points out, even when such...
I haven't mentioned it before, but the Patently Obvious blog on patent law is far more fun than it deserves to be considering the dry subject matter. (And did I mention the great pictures?) Today's topic: the DMCA and the legality...
Lawrence Lessig has Richard Posner guest-blogging for him. Remarkable must-read stuff that already ranges from fair use in car theft to the merits of the Matrix films....
Bloomberg columnist Caroline Baum has a typically cheeky piece scoring a recent celebrity auction's implications for the U.S. economy (and for George Bush's re-election prospects). An excerpt:During the late 1990s stock-market bubble, companies continued to report soaring quarterly profits even...
Perhaps I have been away from the data for too long, but the following chart from a recent IMF report was a surprise to me:Of the OECD countries shown, the U.S. had the largest change in the percentage of the...
Good Tom Hazlett column in the FT on how Google's decision to launch Gmail with 1GB of storage wrong-foots regulators: "By offering 2 GB for the price of 100 MB, the competitive rivalry now on display highlights the implausibility of...
Three provocative pieces in this weekend's money-oriented edition of the N.Y. Times magazine:Paul Krugman argues Alan Greenspan's legacy will be "aid & comfort" to a fiscally irresponsible administration Michael Lewis on the "joys" of investing in socially responsible companies Bill...
A new A.T. Kearney study is out ranking countries as destinations for offshoring. Here are the top 12 overall:1. India2. China3. Malaysia4. Czech Republic5. Singapore6. Philippines7. Brazil8. Canada9. Chile10. Poland11. Hungary12. New ZealandInterestingly, there is only one G8 country in...
A Federal election has been called in Canada, and magnificently loopy stuff is being generated in prodigious quantities. Here is a current favorite:CHARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island (Reuters) - Casting aside a record built up as a tax-cutter, Prime Minister Paul Martin...
Cypess Semiconductor CEO T. J. Rodgers is unique among Silicon Valley CEOs in that a) he is a Republican, and b) he doesn't hide his political views. Read this CNet interview for an entertaining example....
From today's WSJ and an article on the U.S. policy of taxing overseas profits of U.S. firms:The U.S. system for taxing overseas profits of American companies is so riddled with loopholes and credits that the government would collect $6 billion...
From Paul Kasriel's excellent Northern Trust piece today on the U.S. Federal Reserve being checkmated right now by both rising real estate and rising production prices:If the Fed hikes interest rates now to preempt inflation of goods and services prices, it...
Given the current debate about raising the minimum wage, it's worth considering the wage's implications. After all, as Thomas Sowell is fond of saying, whatever the statutory minimum wage, the real minimum wage will always be zero. Employers, in other...
Monster's help-wanted numbers are now out, and here is a quick summary of how its help-wanted index compares to a similar long-standing measure from the Conference Board:...
Apparently Lou Dobbs has crossed some sort of virtual Rubicon on this offshoring issue, and he can't stop himself any more. The Dobbs Watch (tm) reached the pages of the Wall Street Journal this morning, with it highlighting the incongruity...
Let me get this straight. According to San Jose Mercury-News columnist Dan Gillmor, Wal-mart is an evil company. But here are just some of the accolades he drive-by proffers the retailer: It offers great variety at low prices It brought...
What rights do students have with respect to the commercial reuse of their class assignments? That question, in part, has come up in Canada in the context of Turnitin.com, an online plagiarism detection tool. Turnitin relies partly on searching the...
The following paragraph from a recent McKinsey study in offshoring seems to light people's fires on the subject more than anything I know. Cite it at your peril -- I mentioned it in a recent column and I'm getting positively...
A Wall Street Journal story this morning gently but firmly makes the point that many erstwhile free trade supporters are hypocritical. They were fans of free trade so long as it meant blue-collar jobs going overseas, and cheap products coming...
According to the current Advertising Age, things were busy, if nervous, at this week's National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE -- pronounced to (sort of) rhyme with "nasty") conference in Las Vegas. TV execs can't figure out where the...
My National Post column today was on bumpf and posturing at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.Update: Ah, if only I had seen this story before I had written the above column. Apparently the WEF anticipated my criticisms...
Microsoft's quarterly financial results tonight seemingly have many investors in a tizzy. It has nothing to do with the higher-than-expected equity compensation costs, however. Those are shuffling of costs from one period to another, and it isn't all that important...
Quirky piece in the Independent about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent marriage to romance novelist Melanie Craft. It is requisitely snide in that U.K. way, so you get bon mots like the following: "At 34, Ms Craft is 25 years...
A few paragraphs from my weekend National Post column on the escalating tussle over the Byrd Amendment: The ongoing trade spat over the so-called Byrd Amendment is an exercise in deep cynicism on all sides. No matter what resolution is...
What happens to an organization's fund-raising when it raises "too much" money? National Public Radio has that problem after Joan Kroc, wife of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, gave the radio organization a little more than $200-million last year as part...
Will yesteryday's permanent docking of the U.S.S. Midway aircraft carrier on the San Diego waterfront be the tourism bonanza its promoters hope? Certainly, downtown San Diego is in the middle of a massive rebuilding boom, with everything from condo complexes,...
There was an alternately harrowing and fascinating IMF paper released today on the U.S. economy, deficits, and the outlook for the dollar. Here is a long-ish snippet: ... the emergence of large fiscal deficits and signs that they will be...
Universities are becoming hot-beds of patenting. The number of patent filings is on the rise at U.S. universities, outpacing the growth in university research spending. According to AUTM data, research spending is up 30% at U.S. universities in the last...
The news that Microsoft wants money for its file formats being used by flash memory makers has the usual Everything-But-My-Stuff-Should-be-Free crew in a tizzy. They're wrong and being typically silly, of course: Microsoft has a $250K cap per licensee ---...
All businesses require loss leaders. Men's suits, consumer electronics, software, and yes, academic journals -- they all need 'em. Case in point, Nature's current issue and an article therein about the best way to skip stones. While Nature does periodically...
All those shrimp you've been eating lately? Dumped. Not literally, of course, but figuratively, at least according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance. On Wednesday of this past week it filed a request with the U.S. Commerce Department and the U.S....
What caused the economic boom of the 1990s? Was it chance, conscious policy, or some combination of both? And when it ended, was it because of policy errors, or was it just that it the U.S. economy's run of good...
Some reports are saying that Chinese TOEFL-takers (the Test of English as a Foreign Language) have declined precipitously in recent years. According to the article, at peak, in 1999, 100,000 Chinese students a year took the test, most of whom...
From Marginal Revolution: Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no...
New Yorker writer James Surowiecki asks the right question concerning futures markets in public events and the like. While such markets are oft-criticized for being illiquid and being dens for (largely nonexistent) abritrageurs, Surowiecki points out that doesn't invalidate the...
The hit television show Survivor finished last night as improbably as it was through its recent "Pearl Island" run. Lill, a Boy Scout troop leader, seemingly gave away a million dollars. Here is what happened: Lill could select who her...
Facinating new Harvard Press book out next month arguing that discrimination plays little part in reducing the number of minority professors working in universities. Instead, it is affirmative action itself that it is at the root of the problem: Many...
From an interview with Gene and Paul of Kiss on their sharing the stage with Joe and Steve of Aerosmith: "No one does what [Aerosmith does] better. And we tend to think that there's nobody that does what we do...
Here is my June 3rd, National Post column: Media ownership makes for strange bedfellows. Ted Turner, Consumers Union, columnist William Safire, and Lawrence Lessig of Stanford have all tumbled into bed opposing proposed changes in media regulation that would allow...
It is an old and somewhat silly saying, but it applies: When your head is in the oven and your feet are in the fridge, on average you feel okay. Similarly, the Bush Administration's uses the word "average" to say...
I am entirely sympathetic to the plight of technology workers losing theirs jobs. Whether because of outsourcing, or because of a lousy economy, the result is no picnic. Nevertheless, I generally think the technology business is facing the same sort...
Ordinarily columnist Michael Kinsley uses scrupulously clean logic. Something, however, about George W. Bush periodically makes Kinsley blow a fuse and start spouting non sequiturs and illogic. Case in point, this Slate column about Bush's infatuation with small business. In essence,...
An interesting Wall Street Journal story today on the "Buffalo Spammer", a fellow who was rotating through multiple Earthlink accounts sending millions of spam messages. Apparently the WSJ story was very well-timed: he was hit with $14mm in fines late today. That is,...
