economics – Page 4

Tag: economics (page 4 of 10)

Put a dollar figure on carbon emissions

Matthew Yglesias makes a pretty convincing argument that the most effective path to slowing down climate change is putting a price on carbon. Right now, carbon emissions are untaxed, so there’s no market mechanism to reward a reduction in carbon emissions other than the price of using energy. Unfortunately, energy prices are largely decoupled from their environmental impact.

The bubble pattern revisited

September 28, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

A couple of years ago I described the bubble pattern. It’s basically a ~~three~~ four step pattern:

Clever investors find a class of asset that is undervalued.
Dumber investors find out what the clever investors are buying, and pour their money into that class of asset.
Bankers work as hard as they can to increase the supply of assets in that class, despite the fact that these assets are no longer really a good investment.
The bubble bursts.

Chris Dixon explains how this pattern has manifested in venture capital.

Links for September 1

September 1, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Ars Technica: John Siracusa’s Snow Leopard review. 23 pages of goodness.
How the economics of strip malls differ from the economics of commercial blocks in cities.
Jonah Lehrer: The Just World Hypothesis. One of the great moral insights I had at a relatively early age is that the world generally operates with no regard for or propensity toward just outcomes.
Dan Gillmor: Time Pundit’s Rant and (Partly) Misguided Sense of Privacy. You can’t expect email sent to a mailing list to remain private.
WebMonkey: Opera 10 Arrives. Opera has never caught on with me, but they’re to be commended for driving innovation in the browser market and putting the bigger browser makers to shame on a regular bases.

One interesting sentence

July 4, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

To borrow an idea from Tyler Cowen, here’s a really interesting sentence:

After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else.

That’s from a Felix Salmon blog post on Charles Komanoff’s study of the externalities associated with driving in New York. Since my spell checker doesn’t know the word “externalities,” I’ll link to its definition as well.

Links from June 8th

June 8, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Salon: The Learjet repo man. Just an entertaining article.
Dahlia Lithwick: Guantanamo is the least of America’s prison problem. “The United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, houses nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.”
Marginal Revolution: Why U.S. health care policy is especially egalitarian. Guaranteed to undermine at least one thing you believe to be true.
crontab2english. Stop trying to wrap your brain around cron configuration.
McClatchy: Why’d Obama switch on detainee photos? Maliki went ballistic. Make of this what you will.
MySQL Performance Blog: A rule of thumb for choosing column order in indexes. Helpful.
Ruby Best Practices: Reading Ruby’s Standard Library for Fun and Profit. Solid article on reading code.
WoW Insider: Beware of Blood Elves selling mounts. A complex phishing and identity theft scam in World of Warcraft. They used to say that all Web innovations begin on porn sites. I think you can look to World of Warcraft to see tomorrow’s fraud today.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing Page Speed. Google’s version of YSlow.
O’Reilly Radar: TOSBack: EFF’s Much-Needed Terms of Service Tracker. Tracking changes to the terms of service from popular sites.
Elder Game: Yes, the MMO Industry Really is That Bad. Cautionary tale on working in the MMO industry.
Monica Youn: Why Sonia Sotomayor was talking about race in the first place. Useful context for the "wise Latina" speech.
YouTube: R.E.M. 10/10/82 The Pier, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Old footage someone dug up. For more information on the Village Subway, see this excellent post from Goodnight, Raleigh.
High Performance Web Sites: Using Iframes Sparingly. The performance of iframes is really bad.
O’Reilly Radar: Google Squared is an Exponential Improvement in Search. Particularly interesting in light of the recent release of Wolfram Alpha.

Links from May 25th

May 26, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

The Big Picture: Memorial Day, 2009. Moving collection of photos.
James Fallows: On Memorial Day. On the Map of the Fallen project, an overlay for Google Maps with information on the American soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Michael Lewis: The Master of Money. A review of Alice Schroeder’s biography of Warren Buffett.
Wall Street Journal: Obama Is Changing the Art on the White House Walls. An interesting look at the impact of Presidential taste in art.
Financial Times: Argentina: The superpower that never was. Speculation as to why the fortunes of America and Argentina diverged so greatly over the course of the twentieth century.
PSD Blog: The verdict is in on microfinance. The headline is provocative and I think overstates the case. However, it appears that material gains from microfinance are not leading directly to gains in other aspects of human development.
National Journal Online: Chopra Wants To ‘Productize’ Innovations. What the federal CTO is working on.

Links from May 20

May 20, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Long delayed roundup of links:

Dan Benjamin: Top 10 Programming Fonts. I’m currently giving Inconsolata a whirl.
Jasmin Blanchette: The Little Manual of API Design. A very interesting looking PDF that I intend to read.
John Quiggin: Austrian Business Cycle Theory. A very well written critique.
Advanced NFL Stats: Draft Success by Team. Not enough attention is paid to the long term results of the draft.
James Carr: TDD Anti-Patterns. I’m a sucker for lists like this.
Firediff. A diff plugin for Firebug.
Continuing Intermittent Incoherency: Ending The ga.js Wait.Using Dojo to address some of the problems with ga.js, the JavaScript file used by Google Analytics.
Eliot Spitzer: If Judge Posner believes this, the world really has changed – One of the most prominent free market intellectuals thinks the market is incapable of setting CEO pay. Judge Posner has gone on to say many even more provocative things lately. This week he’s guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan.
AisleOne: 8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Design. Very good article on improving your use of type.
James Duncan Davidson: Dear Speakers. Tips for conference speakers.
Ajaxian: FirePHP: Tying together Firebug and PHP. A means of packaging debug information for Firebug to consume with AJAX responses.
LearnHub: How to Compare Hosted DNS Providers (with Data!). DNS performance is an underrated piece of the overall site performance picture.
Seed Magazine: Getting Past the Pie Chart. On the state of data visualization.
USA Today: Announcing baseball’s all-stars in the broadcast booth. Ranking the baseball broadcasters.
A.V. Club: Turn off the shuffle: 25 great albums that work best when listened to from start to finish.
Findings from the A LIST APART Survey, 2008. The results are interesting, but what I really like is the CSS used to create the charts.
Web Style Guide 3. Filing this away for later.
Chad Fowler: 20 Rails Development No-No’s. Compiled from responses to a request for feedback on Twitter.
Last.fm Blog: Mapreduce Bash Script. Very elegant hack.
Migrating from svn to a distributed VCS. This is specific to the Python code base, but it is a great general resource.
Digg the Blog: Introducing Digg’s IDDB Infrastructure. Something I need to digest.
Patrick Peak and Paul Barry: Presentation on BrowserCMS. It’s an up and coming CMS built using Ruby on Rails.
Rogers Cadenhead: Bit.ly Builds Business on Libya Domain. On the risks of relying on the technical governance of an authoritarian dictatorship.
dotfiles.org: .zshrc. A collection of zsh init scripts.
UXmatters: Refining Data Tables. Tips on creating usable reports.
Z-Shell Frequently-Asked Questions. From my recent zsh obsession.
Fried CPU: zsh: The last shell you’ll ever need!. zsh advocacy.
2009 Rubyist’s guide to a Mac OS X development environment. This is where I got the idea to try zsh in the first place.
Time: Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline . An amazing set of photos.
James Dumay: Mac OS X Tip: Preventing accidently launching FrontRow when cycling windows. This happens to me all the time.
Ms. Glaze: Make It Nice or Make it Twice. Very much applicable to software development.
Michael Ruhlman: Duck Confit: It’s What’s For Lunch. Who doesn’t want to confit their own duck?

Monetary policy is not dead

March 18, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Today the Federal Reserve announced it’s buying up $1.2 trillion in bonds as part of a program of quantitative easing. It’s a path to lowering interest rates once you’re in Paul Krugman’s famous liquidity trap.

A few weeks ago self-described right wing economist Scott Sumner suggested that quantitative easing be tried, and Tyler Cowen described his plan as the best he’d seen by far.

I know there’s been a surge of optimism lately, and an attendant degree of skepticism that we’re really even in a major crisis. This move should remind everyone that the Federal Reserve and Obama administration are still very, very worried about the state of the economy.

What would an economist do?

March 9, 2009 / Rafe / 11 Comments

I really want to buy the new Neko Case album, released last week, but I have a suspicion that Amazon.com is going to make it the deal of the day sometime soon. What would an economist tell me? On one hand, it’s only $7.99, and it would probably be on sale for $1.99 (or $3.99, the daily deal price for most new releases). On the other hand, if I buy it for full price and they put it on sale a few days later, I’ll feel a tinge of regret. On one hand I want it now, on the other, I have the whole rest of my life to listen to it either way.

I’m pretty sure that any economist would tell me that every minute I’ve spent trying to time the market for this album has been wasted.

Links from March 1st

March 3, 2009 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Dries Buytaert: Drupal sites. A big list of Drupal sites.
Hivelogic: Review: The NewerTech Voyager Q. Docking station that lets you use internal hard drives as external hard drives. Seems like a great solution for certain backup strategies.
Music Machinery: In search of the click track. Programmatically determining which drummers use click tracks and which don’t. Really, really interesting.
David Plotz: What I learned from reading the entire Biblee. I was obsessed with his Blogging the Bible series, and I’m glad to see it’s now a book.
TheMoneyIllusion: An open letter to Mr. Krugman. A really interesting alternative to the stimulus plan, suggesting novel monetary policy rather than fiscal policy. I have no idea whether this would work, but it’s an interesting idea.

rc3.org

Strong opinions, weakly held