Category: Web/Tech

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.

I am surprised how many people still think Twitter is a fad or a waste of time.  I view Twitter — or some modified future version thereof — as everlasting.  Most of all, the search function helps you tap into a real time conversation on just about any topic you want, including the lecture you just gave.  Google is wonderful but it's hard to sort through the mess and figure out where the conversation is now.  For sampling opinion on either movies or music, Twitter is essential, or even for researching a forthcoming blog post.  Think of it as Google focused on one time-slice and giving the weight of crowd opinion no more than linear force.  If an opinion is more common it will receive more tweets but otherwise your search brings up the splat, ordered by chronology, and thus it is more idiosyncratic than the first Google search page and often in a good way.

At least now, the people on Twitter are smarter on average than the people whose choices feed into Google.  I am not sure that particular benefit will last forever,

If you can find some people worth following, so much the better.  But the value of the medium doesn't much depend on what they had for breakfast.

Many people use Twitter to ask for advice; I have yet to learn how to do this well.

1. The fate of the polymath, including a discussion of Richard Posner.

2. Does Germany have fun right-wingers?

3. David Cronenberg to remake "The Fly.

4. Markets in everything: Psycho donuts.

5. Will sanctions on Iran work?

Please let me know, comments are open.  If you don't have a mental model of my intellectual tastes by now, let the heavens fall.  And if you can, please give their Twitter handle.

1. Interview with Daniel Kahneman.

2. More on why executive compensation was not the problem.

3. The Irish pint isn't actually that traditional after all.

4. Hair dye as a countercyclical indicator.

5. "The true number may be lower" — you don't hear that one so much.

1. Why is tennis less competitive than golf?

2. Is time-space synaethesia useful?  Yes.  It's also pretty common.

3. Luis Goytisolo: next Nobel Laureate?  Who's he?  Here are the odds on the literature Prize.

4. What can you get for $20?

5. Interview with Duflo and Banerjee: what works in the fight against poverty?

6. Best novels of the millennium?

1. Russ Roberts on Masonomics.

2. The walking bratwurst restaurant.

3. Bill Woolsey is blogging.

4. Via Chris Masse, Google lets you vote for the idea that will help the most people.

5. Jim Olds lunches with Tyler.  We ate at Masala Wok, a new Fairfax Indian restaurant which I like.

6. What's the matter with cultural studies?

Your ideas on signalling are always interesting and informative….but,
you focus a lot on signalling to others…..the more fascinating aspect
is the signalling that we do to ourselves…..and why.

I deleted the comment anyway, to prove to myself I am tough and that I abide by the "no spam" rules. 
Behind it was a link to a German site selling computer products.

I assume that above comment was written by a human being.  A' la Turing, I wonder when the average quality of spam comment will exceed the average quality of a non-spam comment.  For many blogs (not MR), we're already there.  Can you imagine blogs competing to capture greater and greater quantities of spam, as a way of "paying" for good comments?  Or how about captchas which only let through spammers and discriminate against most others?