Month: March 2012

Sentences to ponder

And then, finally, there’s Peter Eavis’s conspiracy theory: if the Greek bond exchange goes really smoothly, and the sun rises in the morning and Italian bond yields stay below 5%, then maybe that’s the most worrying outcome of all. Because at that point Greece will have managed to wipe out, at a stroke, debt amounting to some 54% of GDP. You can see how Portugal and Ireland might be a little jealous. You don’t want to make sovereign default too easy — not least because it would do extremely nasty things to European banks’ balance sheets.

That is Felix Salmon, here is more, in recent times Felix has been the go-to guy for the Greece story: “…we’re going through the largest sovereign default in the history of the world, and surprisingly few people — including senior European policymakers and journalists who are covering it professionally — really seem to understand what’s going on.”

Iberia, not Siberia

One of my “crackpot” beliefs about human migration seems to be panning out:

At the height of the last ice age, Stanford says, mysterious Stone Age European people known as the Solutreans paddled along an ice cap jutting into the North Atlantic. They lived like Inuits, harvesting seals and seabirds.

The Solutreans eventually spread across North America, Stanford says, hauling their distinctive blades with them and giving birth to the later Clovis culture, which emerged some 13,000 years ago.

When Stanford proposed this “Solutrean hypothesis” in 1999, colleagues roundly rejected it. One prominent archaeologist suggested that Stanford was throwing his career away.

But now, 13 years later, Stanford and Bruce Bradley, an archaeologist at England’s University of Exeter, lay out a detailed case — bolstered by the curious blade and other stone tools recently found in the mid-Atlantic — in a new book, “Across Atlantic Ice.”

Here is much more.

Did Oprah steal book sales with her reading club?

There is a new paper (pdf) from the excellent Craig Garthwaite, here is the abstract:

This paper studies the economic effects of endorsements. In the publishing sector, endorsements from the Oprah Winfrey Book Club are found to be a business stealing form of advertising that raises title level sales without increasing the market size. The endorsements decrease aggregate adult fiction sales; likely as a result of the endorsed books being more difficult than those that otherwise would have been purchased.  Economically meaningful sales increases are also found for non-endorsed titles by endorsed authors.  These spillover demand estimates demonstrate a broad range of benefits from advertising for firms operating in a multiproduct brand setting.
For one thing, it’s really hard to get people to read more.

Book splat (What I’ve been reading)

Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, very well written, not that much economics.

Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder After the Panic of 1837, stronger on aftermath than causes.

David Tuckett, Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability, a behavioral/cognitive/neuro interpretation of the actions of four fund managers, as they related to the financial crisis.

Alan Peacock, Anxious to do Good: Learning to be an Economist the Hard Way, memoirs, gentlemanly not juicy.

David Wolman, The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers — and the Coming Cashless Society, an informed and well-written look at the continuing evolution of money.

In my pile is Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (how many times has this book been written by now?), Kevin A. Clarke and David M. Primo, A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representation (philosophy of science), and Robert V. Dodge, Schelling’s Game Theory: How to Make Decisions.

The very good The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs are Transforming the Global Economy, by my colleague Philip Auerswald, will be out very soon.