According to researchers, physically unattractive teenagers are more likely to grow up to be criminals. In a study that reads like an issue of the Onion, economists found that the long-term consequences of being young and ugly were consistent. Cute guys were uniformly less likely than averages would indicate to have committed crimes such as […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)Economic blogger Long Tail pulled together a spreadsheet of the top 100 albums and the years they were released (grouped them in 5-year intervals). They were nice enough to post the raw data for downloading. The resulting chart gives a nice graphical representation of how bad things are for the music business. It’s not just […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)We’ll tell this to you as long as you don’t pass it along. It will upset too many constituencies that have vested stakes in things being worse off than ever before. It turns out that new reports by the Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Board on the economic well-being of the typical American family […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)A portfolio manager at the Gabelli Funds did the following calculation:
5,000 Google employees
$4.5m pre-tax cash flow
52x cash flow stock market valuation
$230 million of market value per employee
Looking at it this way, Google is underpaying employees more than any other company in history. Bad Google! Time to call the union boys in.
h/t: WSJ
Two weeks ago the Los Angeles Times‘ Michael Hiltzik trumpeted in his blog that the mediocre retail sales figures from Thanksgiving weekend proved that the economy was in trouble — and Hiltzik, for one, couldn’t be happier:
The ideological spinners on the state of the U.S. economy made much of the recent upward revision in third-quarter […]
Marginal Revolution: India fact of the day
A bone-marrow transplant costs $2.5 million in the United States. Doctors in India can do it for $26,000.
There was a time not long ago where American computer programmers looked down on their Indian counterparts and believed that American companies would never trust mission critical IT to Indians. No longer. […]
The Los Angeles Times is concerned that — gasp — individuals have to decide whether to return to New Orleans:
Lost amid continued talk of billions in federal aid is the fact that most homeowners and businesses are being left to make the toughest calls on their own. Lost is that New Orleans’ recovery — which […]
On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times‘ Michael Hiltzik chortled over the lower-than-expected retail sales numbers on Thursday and posted in his Times blog:
The ideological spinners on the state of the U.S. economy made much of the recent upward revision in third-quarter GDP numbers and even more of retailers’ initially upbeat claims about “Black Thursday” crowds, […]
In a post titled “That Bright, Shining Economy Springs A Leak,” Los Angeles Times columnist / blogger Michael Hiltzik gleefully writes that “the ideological spinners on the state of the U.S. economy” who deny “honest, objective reporting that cited the tapped-out consumer, layoff announcements, and high energy prices” have been proven wrong by the November […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)Econoblogger Marginal Revolution gives a nice rundown on why the health care market doesn’t perform so well. One would expect that given an efficient market the healthcare ship would ultimately right itself–but it hasn’t. Why is that? Read the hyperbole-free post to learn the latest theories on why not.
On a related and more local note, […]
You’ve just lost a loved one. You are exhausted dealing with all of the arrangements. You are in emotional turmoil. You are hurt. You are angry. You are sad. The funeral is in a few hours and you just don’t have the energy or mind set to “wail, scream and create the anguished sorrow befitting […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)Below is an example of headline-hungry media chasing a non-story and failing to put claims into any kind of mathematical perspective.
Just look at these major media headlines:
Briton cures himself of HIV, medical world stunned
Patient cures himself of HIV
Doctors baffled as HIV man ‘cures’ himself
MIRACLE HIV SCOT COULD CURE MILLIONS
Too bad nobody bothered […]
Now that bloggers have to pay for Paul Krugman’s opinions, they aren’t so interested in them.
Ever since the New York Times placed its opinion columnists behind the $49.95 / year TimesSelect wall in mid-September, Krugman has been the topic of fewer blog posts. Blogpulse’s trend tools show how often the phrase “Paul Krugman” was […]
If they had just asked Independent Sources, we could have told them without the expense of a study.
The Hooters Effect: NBER Paper Finds Attractiveness of Woman Soliciting Charitable Gift Increases Size of Donation:
This study develops theory and uses a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to explore the economics of charity. We approached nearly 5000 households, randomly […]
“I remember once (during the air phase of the Gulf War) seeing John Kenneth Galbraith making pronouncements on TV about the military situation, and telling friends that if I ever start pontificating in public about a technical subject I don’t understand, they should gag me.”
Paul Krugman, April 1999 (scroll about 90% of the way to […]
