Apple, Beneath All That Fuzzy Marketing ...

... is a soulless corporation just like any other. After paying money for shutting down ThinkSecret, they are after the FakeSteveJobs blog - all very sinister (if its true). Dont buy a Mac, dude. My next machine for sure will run some variant of Linux.

Update: Yep, it was made up as I expected.

Krugman on the Current Financial Mess

Paul is one of my favorite authors, and this is his first lectures I've been able to watch (I actually listened to most of this while driving to work). Thanks, YouTube!

Free the Markets!

Some monopolies are natural, ie the underlying market dynamics are such that it makes sense for a single company to be the sole provider of a particular good or service (utilities with a high fixed cost of distribution are typical examples). Other monopolies (or oligopolies), are legislated - ie the government decrees that a particular company (or set of companies) will provide a good or service. Examples in this category includes the TSA (airport security) and gambling. Online gambling is a particularly egregious example where local oligopolies are forced, so that a minority segment of the population can profit off of gaming. The segments that gain off this scheme are casino owners of Vegas, a number of indian tribes and their financiers, and politicians who receive contributions. The cost is to the society as a whole in terms of deadweight loss (high prices and unnatural profits). The internet has a tendency to eliminate boundaries and make the entire globe a single market. In the case of gambling, anyone with a gaming site can serve citizens of any country. Now there is an added cost to the US economy in terms of settlements with other WTO member countries which are suing as these laws go against the competitive requirements of the WTO. The US is taking a "rules dont apply to us" approach and paying off the EU, Japan and several other countries so that the complaint from Antigua does not get the required support. Tsk tsk - all this in a country that prides itself on free markets and every single student who takes an introductory economics class is taught that monopolies are wasteful to the economy.

The morality of gambling, whether we should allow people to gamble or not is a completely separate question. The issue is that if gambling is legal, should participating in that industry be limited to a few individuals or companies with ties to the government?

Your Suspicions Are True

Those annoying searches at the airport only slow you down and dont do much to secure the flights ... now confirmed by research.

And You May Ask Yourself ...

David Byrne of Talking Heads has a great article in Wired about (at least) six models for producing music today. Among other things, what jumped out at me was the metric that about $7 of each CD goes towards Label Overhead and Retail Overhead. If online distribution can eliminate that, then a whole new market segment opens up. iTunes gets us partially there, but currently they take a 30% cut - that should rapidly drop to zero if another company could break the monopoly. Hello, Amazon?

Housing Futures Point to Trouble

The futures market says that SF housing is expected to be down 6% in 2008 - great information for bargaining house prices. As Greg Mankiw is fond of saying - arent markets great?

Why is copyright expanding like a pufferfish?

Prof Netanel has written a paper on it.

Red Meat and Cancer

According to research published by Public Library of Science, eating habits are correlated with cancer as much as smoking is. In particular, the red and processed meats seem to have the most carcinogenic compounds, and risk of certain kinds of cancer increases more than 20% for individuals who eat substantial amounts.

Foreclosure Drivers

Interesting research paper from the Federal Bank of Boston - finds that the prime driver of foreclosure is depreciating housing prices, rather than recession in the economy. Havent read the whole thing yet...

Tom Friedman's Been Watching Jon Stewart Apparently ...

So he's written an op-ed thats so funny that it wants to make you cry, like any good satire piece should. Who knew Tom Friedman had it in him?

A Young and Prescient Jon Stewart

Conflict of Interest at Goldman Sachs?

Ben Stein questions the ethics at GS. Customers of investment banks, check to make sure they are putting their money where their mouth is.

The Drug War Tragedy

Of all magazines, Rolling Stone has a surprisingly comprehensive overview of the war on drugs. Very good companion piece to the movie Traffic, and the excellent BBC miniseries it was based on.

Against Expert Advice

Heartwarming story from Malawi. No doubt that left wing will look at this as evidence that free markets do not work in many situations. But my opinion is that this actually is a case of markets actually working, as long as you consider the government as part of the market. Academics usually tend to consider government as an entity that operates outside the market, but the reality is that the goverment IS an inherent stakeholder in the market. In this case the government considered an investment case where if they invested in the fertilizer, the returns to the whole economy increased. So like any rational actor in the market, they invested. The simpleton in this story is the western advisor who looked up his textbook - saw the maxim that government subsidies are bad - and repeated it without looking at the overall return to the economy. Dont attribute to market failure what you can attribute to stupidity. All governments (free market or otherwise) undertake projects that generate returns for the economy as a whole. The problem with planned economies is that they frequently tend to invest in projects that have poor returns to the economy. And the problem with naive academics is that they tend to put theory over pragmatism.