Posts filed under ‘Ephemera’
Econo-Bloggers and the Public Good
| Peter Klein |
An interesting result from Aaron Schiff’s survey of econo-bloggers (I was a respondent):
There [was] a series of questions asking respondents to rate factors according to their importance as motivations for blogging on a scale of 1 to 5. “Fun or entertainment,” “To raise my profile,” “Contribute to policy/political debates,” “To educate the public or disseminate research.” and “As a way of recording thoughts or ideas” were rated highest, all with a median score of 4. “Contribute to academic debates” had a median of 3, “To get reader feedback from comments” and “To improve writing skills” both scored 2, while “Actual or potential direct income” and “Actual or potential indirect income” both had a median of 1.
Economists’ desire to educate the public and to disseminate research, for the public good, is generally underrated, especially among non-economists. However, the pecuniary motives from blogging may be stronger than Aaron’s analysis suggests; the immediate rewards are few, but raising one’s profile has obvious long-term career benefits (as in the open-source case).
NB: Contrary to common belief, academic bloggers don’t think about blogging 24/7. A few times during the ASSA meeting I’d pull out my laptop during a session, to take notes or to work on my own presentation, and a panelist would ask me afterwards: “Were you blogging about me?”
O&M for the High-Time-Preference Reader
| Peter Klein |
Want to know the instant a new post or comment appears on O&M? Sign up for Pingie and have our main or comments feed — or any RSS feed — sent to your mobile phone via SMS.
Most Popular Posts of 2007
| Peter Klein |
Our most popular posts of 2007:
- Physics Envy and All That
- Design Puzzles
- Contronymns
- Taxes al Carbon
- The University of Phoenix and the Economic Organization of Higher Education
- How Does Management Affect Capabilities?
- Market-Based Management
- Agency Theory in Management
- Has Corporate Corruption Increased?
- The SWOT Model May Be Wrong
- Management Journal Impact Factors 2005
- PhD Candidate Shortage in Accounting
- Things You Shouldn’t Say at Your Dissertation Defense
- Do We Need a Project Project?
- The Legacy of Max Weber
- The Language of Economists (and Sociologists)
- Accounting: A Brief History
- Is Entrepreneurship a Factor of Production?
- The Galileo Legend
- The New Bashing of Economics: The Case of Management Theory
What makes a popular post? The main determinant seems to be an incoming link from a high-traffic site; items 1-4, 6, and 13-15 above were all linked from sites like Instapundit, the Dynamist Blog, Greg Mankiw, and Marginal Revolution. Items 5, 9, 12, and 17 come up often in search -engine results. My guess that items 7, 8, 10, 16, 18, and 20 were the most popular among our regular readers.
Starbucks Is Good for Mom and Pop
| Peter Klein |
The WSJ ran a piece a few years back showing that independently owned coffeehouses do better after Starbucks moved to town. Taylor Clark (of Starbucked fame) provides similar figures in today’s Slate:
In its predatory store placement strategy, Starbucks has been about as lethal a killer as a fluffy bunny rabbit. . . . According to recent figures from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, 57 percent of the nation’s coffeehouses are still mom and pops. Just over the five-year period from 2000 to 2005 — long after Starbucks supposedly obliterated indie cafes — the number of mom and pops grew 40 percent, from 9,800 to nearly 14,000 coffeehouses. (Starbucks, I might add, tripled in size over that same time period. Good times all around.)
The theory is that Starbucks’s rapid growth (maybe not this rapid) has boosted the demand among US consumers for premium coffee, a demand that Starbucks alone cannot satisfy. Three cheers for positive spillovers! (Greg Mankiw, how about Pigouvian subsidies for poor old Howard Schultz?)
Christmas Classics
| Peter Klein |
It’s that magical season, time to enjoy your favorite Christmas classics — not The Night Before Christmas or It’s a Wonderful Life, but “In Defense of Scrooge” and “Economics of Santa’s Workshop” by Michael Levin from the old Free Market newsletter. Steve Landsburg’s 2004 piece on Scrooge is not as penetrating as Levin’s, but who can disagree with his conclusion: “Its taxes, not misers, that need reforming.”
Warmest holiday wishes to you and yours from the O&M crew!
Performance-Enhancing Drugs and Competitive Advantage
| Peter Klein |
Once again, performance-enhancing drugs are in the news. In a highly competitive environment some people will do anything to gain an advantage, despite the potential long-term health risks. How widespread is the problem, and what should be done about it?
No, not baseball. I’m taking about professors popping “smart pills” to improve their cognitive performance. Two Cambridge researchers report in Nature that colleagues studying brain disorders are themselves using drugs like Modafinil “to counteract the effects of jetlag, to enhance productivity or mental energy, or to deal with demanding and important intellectual challenge.”
Is this acceptable? “Should the life of the mind be chemically enhanced,” asks the Chronicle, “when, say, a professor needs to crank out a tenure-worthy paper?” Many of us consume massive quantities of caffeine already; perhaps Modafinil isn’t really all that different. Others see the practice akin to Ritalin abuse by college students. “It smells to me a lot like taking steroids for physical prowess,” says one critic.
My questions: If we discover that particular scholars are using these substances, should we put asterisks by their publications in reference lists? Should we deny them places in the academic Hall of Fame?
Open-Source Chinese Food
| Peter Klein |
“And bring me a side of Mozilla.”
Mark Liberman explains how this likely happened. My advice: check the “history” tab before ordering. (HT: NameWire)
Most Expensive Cities
| Peter Klein |
Luanda, Angola tops this year’s list, followed by Oslo and Moscow. Tokyo has dropped out of the top ten, replaced by London. Unfortunately for Nicolai’s purchasing power Copenhagen has moved up two spots to #5.
Strange Email Fact of the Day
| Peter Klein |
Donald Knuth, creator of 
Jeff Tucker finds gmail revolutionary, but I think it has important weaknesses as well as strengths. I use imap and archive really old messages to my local workstation, where they are indexed for easy search by Google Desktop. Of course no protocol is perfect, and I’m eager to see what the market will come up with next.
How Commies Build Cars
| Peter Klein |
A funny clip from an old Trabant factory in East Germany. (Via Per Bylund.)
Pomo Periscope XVI: An Unusually Honest Journal
| Nicolai Foss |
It might be that the most popular category of posts on O&M has the same name as this journal — but, seriously, would you read a journal that is this explicit about its aims, content, readership, etc.? Then again, if you do you might be exposed to nifty little nuggets like this delicately titled piece. Or, you might be able to join a conference where
Researchers, activists and media-artists meet on the Trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Beijing September 11th-20th 2005.
The conference “Capturing the Moving Minds” gathers a pack of people … artists, economists, researchers, philosophers, activists … who are interested in the new logic of the economy, the new form of war against terrorism and in the new cooperative modes of creation and resistance, together in a space moving in time. Spatially moving bodies and bodies moving in time (through the different time zones) creates an event, a meeting that not really ‘is’ but ‘is going on’.
The nonsense continues in the same vein; read the rest yourself. One thing is certain: This will not be the last time that the Periscope zooms in on Ephemera!
The Power of Incentives, Monday Morning Edition
| Peter Klein |
1. The Vatican is trying incentive pay. (Prediction from Bob, Jeff, and company: performance will fall as worldly, extrinsic motivation pushes out warm, ethereal “feelings for the entity.”) (Via Luke Froeb)
2. My friend Tim Terrell reports on this new program at Wofford College:
My college recently instituted a free bicycle sharing program on campus. There was a lot of self-satisfied puffery from those responsible for the program, with even a “Blessing of the Bikes” ceremony carried out by our chaplain.
Informal polls I conducted in my classrooms indicated that the bikes are being tossed in the shrubbery, left unlocked, used as makeshift shot-puts on Fraternity Row, etc. etc. I passed one left lying on the grass, unlocked of course, on my short walk in to my office this morning. One student says he saw a vagrant in the neighborhood riding around on one. After a little over a week, another student remarked that most of the bikes were in the maintenance shop for repairs. We are now subject to a barrage of flyers, e-mail announcements, etc. pleading with students to treat the bikes well and lock them up (there is a single code to all the combination locks — want to guess how long it took people from the neighboring campus to figure out the code?).
Bob and Jeff, what happened? Surely all these opportunistic, ethically challenged students can’t be economics majors.
Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World
| Peter Klein |
On a recent trip to Paris my wife suddenly remarked, in horror, “Do you realize that all the famous Parisian landmarks are government buildings?” It’s true, there’s not a private-sector creation among them, unless you count churches or the Tour Montparnasse (which I think was built with private funds). Come on kids, let’s see the next monument to government waste!
On a related note, if you like black humor, check out this Esquire piece on the Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World. It’s fascinating, in a creepy sort of way. (Only structures built by second- and third-world despots are included, which rules out the grotesque US Embassy in Baghdad.) (HT: Steve Sailer)
Metanomics
| Steve Phelan |
I have used a lot of simulation studies in past papers and I currently sit on the editorial board of the Journal of Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory (CMOT). However, I was surprised to stumble upon an emerging field in economics called “metanomics.” (more…)
Mizzou-KU in the WSJ
| Peter Klein |
We don’t normally discuss trivia such as college football here at O&M (we prefer other trivia). But when your team’s big game makes the front page of the WSJ, you have to say something.
A story in today’s paper, “New Powers in College Football Carry Old Baggage,” focuses on this weekend’s showdown between the undefeated 2nd-ranked Kansas Jayhawks and the 4th-ranked Missouri Tigers, two normally-mediocre teams that have exploded onto the national stage this season. The subject is not the game itself, but the historical hatred between Missourians and Kansans that goes back to the Civil War (or, as we call it around here, the War or Northern Aggression).
This hatred dates back to the 1850s, when the Great Plains state of Kansas became a beachhead for men around the country committed to ending slavery. Many, however, hid behind that noble cause, all the while killing, pillaging and raping their way across the culturally Southern state to the east, Missouri. These Kansas guerrillas called themselves Jayhawkers — supposedly a combination of two birds, the jay and the hawk. (more…)
Econometrics Haiku
| Peter Klein |
From Keisuke Hirano (via Marginal Revolution). Samples:
Supply and demand:
without a good instrument,
not identified.T-stat looks too good.
Use robust standard errors —
significance gone.From negation comes
growth, progress; not unlike a
referee report.
Monty Python and the Health Insurance Business in California
| David Hoopes |
My wife was talking to our dental insurance company the other day and John Cleese, Michael Paline, Eric Idle et al. came to mind.
Wife (Chris): I don’t understand why you haven’t paid us for this.”
Dental non-insurer: “You went over your limit.”
C: “It was our first visit.”
DN: “Sorry.”
“You don’t pay for teeth cleaning?”
“Oh yes. We do.”
“But you are not going to pay for this visit for teeth cleaning?”
“No, I’m sorry but you can only do it so many times per year.”
“That was the first time.”
“Sorry.”
“Can you tell me why you haven’t paid the January visit?”
“I don’t think we’ve received the claim.”
“I’ve sent you that claim five times”
“Oh, that’s right. Sorry. We need to see the x-rays.”
“The dentist sent you the x-rays 10 months ago.”
“Well, we don’t have them anymore.”
“Where are they?”
“We sent them back.”
“Where did you send them? I didn’t get them.”
“We sent them to who[m]ever sent them to us.”
“Who was that?”
“Whoever we sent them to.” (more…)
The Philips Machine
| Nicolai Foss |
I just spent three days in London. Jolly, indeed. Before going to the London Business School yesterday, where I had a paper expertly demolished and teared apart by Michael Jacobides, I visited for the first, but certainly not last, time the Science Museum on Exhibition Road. The museum is really quite marvelous, and I very strongly recommend it. Even wives are likely to take interest.
I was strolling through the section on computing when — quite unexpectedly, because I had no idea it was on display at the museum — I noticed the famous Philips Machine (here is a pic), essentially a hydro-mechanical analogue computer designed to exhibit the functioning of the economy from the point of a very crude Keynesian perspective. The Machine was constructed by Bill Philips, of Philips curve fame, and was the reason why 1950s macro is sometimes referred to as “hydraulic Keynesianism” (a term that was coined by the brilliant, but now forgotten Alan Coddington). No less than 12 copies were built for teaching purposes and sold to various UK universities. The one that is on display at the museum was resurrected from a LSE lumber room (shockingly, the machine was actually used in teaching until 1992. But then again the macro I was exposed to in the 1980s was no less silly than Philips’ machine). Here is an excerpt from a BBC programme on the machine.
Funny Things Scientific Researchers Do
| Peter Klein |
- Find oldest living animal, then kill it (via Gary Peters).
- Discover a primitive civilization in the US Midwest.
- Use game theory to analyze the toilet-seat problem.
Halloween Movies for Middle Managers
| Peter Klein |
The Saw movies, writes Grady Hendrix in Slate, are perfect for middle managers. Typical slasher flicks are “id-tickling celebrations of the chaos that ensues when mindlessly violent monsters are unleashed in controlled environments like summer camps, schools, hospitals, and space stations. ” By contrast, Jigsaw — the protagonist-villian of the Saw films — is
a pedant and a bore, a Type A overachiever who is constantly creating “tests” for the other characters and then grading the results. Chaos is his enemy; order and personal productivity are his friends. He’s a management drone leading the cast in a team-building exercise. . . . In Saw III he uses liquefied pigs, death by car wash, and a tricked-out version of the rack to awaken a grieving father to the magic of forgiveness. It’s the liberating figure of the motion picture monster reduced to the status of a self-help guru. And he won’t shut up. “Despite all of the advantages and privileges that you were given at birth, you have returned to prison again and again,” he scolds one of his victims. “Up until now, you have spent your life among the dead, piecing together their final moments. You’re good at this because you are also dead. Dead on the inside,” he preaches at another. It’s like an endless lecture from your mom.
The Saw movies don’t just celebrate traps; they are traps: Fans are lured in with the promise of gore, but they find themselves stuck in their seats, subjected to Jigsaw’s endless stream of numbing pseudo-profundities.
An “endless stream of numbing pseudo-profundities”? Hmmm, sounds like some of the academic journals I read.
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