1. The honey bomb.
2. Should you go to law school?
4. Rortybomb on credit cards and here also.
5. Will eBooks wall off social knowledge?
6. The commercial real estate bubble, a good post for the skeptics.
Assorted links
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i’ll tell you how to be happier. just BE HAPPIER. there. i said it, and you did it.
RE: number 5.
That dude is crazy. Torrents, and direct downloading sites like rapidshare will become only more popular as e-readers increase in prevalence. You can find just about the entire Princeton U press catalog online. (Not that I would, as I prefer to hold hard copies.)
In the future authors will live off their paypal tip jars.
“Why not relearn how to do what we’ve already done, and make my debit card trade for what it is worth, which is called “at par†?”
The Federal Reserve was able to make checks trade at par because it assumed all the overhead of processing checks (we nationalized the check clearing houses). We the citizens of America were and still are paying these processing fees, we are just now paying them through our taxes. Check handling is not free, the government employs an army of people processing checks. Which is sort of sad: in a nation where only the well off had checking accounts, the government stepped in to cover their check processing fees for them. In effect, taxing everyone to pay for a handout to the well off.
Don’t worry. You can do it again. The poor today that cannot get a checking account will be happy for the government to take over the job of processing your debit transactions just so you (through your retailer) no longer need to pay for this work yourselves.
The question is not whether VISA is taking a cut, it must take some cut or its employees will quit to find jobs that pay. The question is whether VISA is taking monopoly cuts, which it is not: the vast majority of the cut goes to the issuing banks. And because of that, the customers get free checking and lower fees. My bank pays me interest on my checking and never charges me a fee for anything; it is only able to do that thanks to the fees it collects from retailers. You can outlaw transaction fees, maybe the fee structure will reverse, with the banks paying VISA a cut out of their customers wallets (annual fees, overdraft fees, fewer ATMs, ATM fees, etc). Or maybe the government will take over the costs of operating VISA and Mastercard like they did with the check clearing houses. But it is unclear to me that would be a better world than the one we already have.
a further squeeze on smaller businesses
And “family farmers” too!
And don’t forget “the children”.
Thank goodness we have a big benevolent government and so many benevolent elected officials and bureaucrats to look out for “small business” “family farms” and “the children” – and protect all the rest of us children from the big bad world and all those evil companies and wealthy people.
If you are smart enough to be the best or even just complete law school, you can do better than $60k and even $120k
Andrew, this is the first time I feel compelled to say you don’t know what you are talking about. There are many lawyers I know who don’t make even 50k per year. I got my JD in the mid 1980s, and that statement has been true since then.
The chart at http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/01/07/the-costs-and-benefits-of-grad-school/ looks very similar to what my classmates and I experienced, and what I hear from many lawyers who finished law school after me.
The best rule is to not go into debt, or keep the debt very low (less than $15k to $20k), for any grad school so your work / income choices aren’t driven by the debt service. Get an employer or wealthy uncle or grants/scholarships to pay for grad school. Or pay as you go. Or don’t go.
My law school debt was easily serviced as it was equivalent to an inexpensive new car loan. So I drove even less expensive (cheap) used cars and lived in much less expensive houses until the student loans were paid off. No problem for me, but many people seemingly don’t want to do that.
Krugman’s conclusion is baffling. That we see CRE prices lagging house prices could also indicate that the latter are pushing the former up as they are not independent (in an obvious way by the price of land and in a less direct one by the possibility of reconversion).
Noting the perils of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, we can still safely say that the theory that it was a broad-based bubble would not (by itself) explain the lag, while the theory that CRE prices were pushed up by the housing boom would. So Krugman’s stylized fact doesn’t do much for the broad-based bubble theory.
“Andrew, this is the first time I feel compelled to say you don’t know what you are talking about. There are many lawyers I know who don’t make even 50k per year.”
In the law? I’m talking about in a different profession, after not going to law school. What I’m talking about is that I’m going to get my PhD, I’ve radically upgraded my capabilities and will have quite likely reduced my earnings, not even counting opportunity cost, recession and lost time for compounding investments (haha). I did not plan for this to be the case and I’m not a “silly social sciences major.”
The nocebo effect is just as real as the placebo effect.
the law school chart:
these are STARTING salaries. My husband started at 55k working for the gov’t, three and a half years later he’s making 125K. I’d like to see a chart with the salaries of all lawyers.
I thought the entire “happiness is contagious” argument was ridden with methodical errors.
That you call Krugman’s post a good post for the skeptics saddens me. There’s no analysis of the graph — though there are many possible explanations of it. He does no work at all to connect the reader to the opinion he wants to share with the reader. That’s simply the arrogance of using intellectual fame to “persuade” — a clear appeal to his authority.
The truth is that Krugman usually gives much more analysis, even if I often disagree with it. So when I see you promote this post, it makes me think less of you as a promoter and a thinker.
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