Category: Web/Tech

1. Blog on Chinese financial markets.

2. Webcast site for my NIH talk, coming on Wednesday noon, on lotteries and randomized control trials in medical research.

3. Very good comments on geo-engineering, with some excellent sentences, and more here.

4. Why the Euro is not the next global currency.

5. Evidence on pedigree effects in academia.

6. Cory Doctorow's publishing experiment.

1. Ryan Avent on why geo-engineering would be hard to pull off, and Matt Yglesias.

2. Finland makes broadband a legal right.

3. Montage of galaxy mergers; none were approved by the FTC.

4. Craig Newmark on the future of media: "Trust is the new black."

5. Excerpts from Jung's The Red Book.

1. Larry Lessig: Against transparency.

2. "Moscow will blast clouds from the sky this winter to save money on snow removal"…

3. Problems with Arab education.

4. Which books are they burning in North Carolina?  (Hint: it includes the Bible, and they're serving barbecued chicken.)

5. The hardest logic puzzle ever?

1. Can complex financial assets be booby-trapped?

2. Jon Chait makes the case against prizes.

3. Bruce Bartlett opposes cutting the payroll tax.

4. Which countries produce the most beef? (put the cursor on the balloons)

5. Metaphors: people mostly describe their lives in terms of a "journey"; is this just our tendency to impose false or misleading narrative on events?  Poorer people, however, are more likely than richer people to describe their lives as a "battle."

6. John Nye on inequality and positional goods (read the whole symposium).

Here is my article in the Wilson Quarterly, in their latest issue on "The Death of the Book."  Excerpt:

Sometimes it does appear I am impatient. I’ll discard a half-read book that 20 years ago I might have finished. But once I put down the book, I will likely turn my attention to one of the long-running stories I follow online. I’ve been listening to the music of Paul McCartney for more than 30 years, for example, and if there is some new piece of music or development in his career, I see it first on the Internet. If our Web surfing is sometimes frantic or pulled in many directions, that is because we care so much about so many long-running stories. It could be said, a bit paradoxically, that we are impatient to return to our chosen programs of patience.

Another way the Web has affected the human attention span is by allowing greater specialization of knowledge. It has never been easier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project without at the same time losing touch with the world around you. Some critics don’t see this possibility, charging that the Web is destroying a shared cultural experience by enabling us to follow only the specialized stories that pique our individual interests. But there are also those who argue that the Web is doing just the opposite–that we dabble in an endless variety of topics but never commit to a deeper pursuit of a specific interest. These two criticisms contradict each other. The reality is that the Internet both aids in knowledge specialization and helps specialists keep in touch with general trends.

They also asked me for the Twitter version of the article, and it is this:

“Smart people are doing wonderful things.”

1. A blog which tracks unfortunate acronyms, such as Department on Aging.

2. Monkeys sense the "uncanny valley."

3. Are most of the returns to schooling non-pecuniary?

4. Is Canada failing its north?

5. Is backward time travel sabotaging the Hadron collider?

6. Interview with Eric Maskin, on the financial crisis.

1. Why are jets not getting faster.

2. Report from the Singularity Summit.

3. Statistics about Twitter.

1. Pandrogeny: one man's project to turn himself into his deceased spouse.

2. Will Leipzig have to pay off bonds from 1926, thereby possibly bankrupting itself?

3. Via Chris F. Masse, Intrade archive and here and here Chris points us to AcaWiki.

4. Caplan-Boettke debate on Austrian economics.

5. David Leonhardt on Bruce Bartlett.

6. Why Argentina fell apart.

7. Are mandatory calorie reports on the menu effective?: No.

1. Markets in everything: fish in a squirrel suit (disgusting), via Kathleen Fasanella).

2. How good is microinsurance?

3. Preserving network neutrality without regulation.

4. More on pay-what-you-wish pricing.

5. Ryan Avent responds; in his closing: "I have learned something from this exchange – Tyler discounts arguments
couched in emotional, or emotional-seeming, terms. That’s a shame.
Sometimes people see and write most clearly when they allow themelves
to be angry. It’s then that they feel no obligation to water down their
argument with unnecessary caveats or efforts to protect interpersonal
relationships. Maybe Tyler never has these inclinations, but I believe
that most people do."

6. Top 20 albums of the 2000s?

1. A wise man.

2. Follow (some of) behavioral economics on Twitter.

3. Scott Sumner has an excellent post on the multi-faceted multiplier.

4. Bankruptcy vs. derivatives.

5. Markets in everything: Denver alternative paper seeks marijuana critic.

1. Robert Frank channels Mark Kleiman on using game theory to fight crime.

2. Inappropriate posters for Roman Polanski movies.

3. Markets in everything: Google Wave advance invites for sale.

4. New Larry Summers profile, from The New Yorker.  Brad DeLong has several posts of comment.

1. Economics art gallery, at Cornell.

2. Contribution to Economist Roundtable on European banking regulation.

3. Paint can block wireless signals.

4. Interview with Tony Judt; excellent throughout, especially on Russia.

5. When should new Nobel Prizes be added?

1. The AEA program for January.

2. Side effects from placebos are drug-specific.

3. New market-oriented tech policy blog.

4. Betting on the literature Nobel.

5. The discontinuous economics of condoms.

6. More on the Swiss health care system.

@tylercowen Just noticed that your praise of twitter was almost all externalities–ways a nonuser could benefit. Perverse sort of praise.

That is Hyperpape, from Twitter.  By "nonuser" I think he means "non-tweeter," not non-reader or non-searcher.  In my portrait Twitter consists mainly of social benefits yet it offers few private gains for many generators of the content.  So why do so many people do it?  Maybe it tricks our instincts for sociability or connection. 

If suppliers can control our environments to an increasing degree, and thus trick our instincts, is "all externalities" the production paradigm of the future?  Is that what the web is about?

Maybe I should tweet that.

It would be odd if a medium which appears to offer so much choice in fact tricks and enslaves us to work for others.

Here is my previous praise of Twitter.

1. Profile of Zero Hedge.

2. Health care expenditures, in graphic form.

3. The Law of One Price: Costco vs. Manhattan.

4. "These factors combine to make our era the most consistently and consequentially deluded and unadaptive of any era ever.": Robin Hanson is on a roll.  Or how about this:

Our dreamtime will be a time of legend, a favorite setting for grand
fiction, when low-delusion heroes and the strange rich clowns around
them could most plausibly have changed the course of history.  Perhaps
most dramatic will be tragedies about dreamtime advocates who could
foresee and were horrified by the coming slow stable adaptive eons, and
tried passionately, but unsuccessfully, to prevent them.