1. Lots of opinions about lots of people, including assessments of their relative status.
2. How will Twitter make money? (a request), and more here.
3. Garett Jones: "How much have
cell phones pushed down the cash wages of tedious jobs? Labor supply
increase: parking attendant, janitor, better jobs now."
5. Rules for writing non-fiction.
6. Pay as you wish, for the Goo Game: the results.
Maybe I’m missing something, but the Garett Jones line doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
I guess garett jones’s idea is that since cell phones make certain jobs less tedious people would be more likely to take them and thus the wages for these jobs go down.
All he has to prove is:
1. cell phones make certain jobs less tedious
2. this (and not the biggest recession since the great depression) has resulted in an increase in demand for these jobs; and
3. this has resulted in the decline of wages for these jobs.
If he proves 1 and 2, I will even spot him 3.
3. I can tell you that I would have quit grad school if it weren’t for my MP3 player. This is a very tedious job. Maybe that’s why Tyler didn’t see the online ed thing coming. To the people getting paid I’m sure academia seems quite idyllic. And the fact that we get crappy cell coverage here is always an irritation. So, I can see a lot more people willing to take my job (please) if it were less hair pullingly crappy. I’ll add this to my list of why I hate the “technology is disinflationary” idea.
Bryan Caplan says:
See what non-academics think too, even if they seem like idiots.
You can sure tell where he is coming from.
I just want to know why anyone would take this guy seriously.
I feel sorry for him that he has never experienced the real world.
For those who like Chanran Kautha’s Two Conceptions of Liberty, I’d also recommend Jacob Levy’s “Liberalism’s Divide“.
I’m with Seavey on the entirely pluralist & thin end. I also think Howley is wrong to say that militarism is not a problem for “propertarians”. Militaries are government agencies and war is organized physical coercion.
Regarding writing fiction or nonfiction, a good Hemingway piece to read (a short story) to get a sense of how spare descriptions of people can be is “Hills Like White Elephants.” It influenced Elmore Leonard in his writing. Elmore also suggests you “leave out the parts people tend to skip when they read.” A pretty simple but brilliant suggestion.
Comments on this entry are closed.