Category: Web/Tech

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JewishAtheist suggests Opposite Day:

I was thinking it might be fun to have an opposite day, where the atheists do their best to argue that theism is correct and the theists do their best to argue that atheism is correct. Perhaps some Jews can argue that Christianity is correct and vice versa. The point is to get you to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and see what the logic looks like from that side.

It’ll only work if you really try, though. You must resist mocking or parodying the position you’re supposed to be fighting for.

I’ll open up the comments, and let you suggest a topic where I should blog the opposite of my point of view.  Three mentions wins it (the standard rule these days), and of course it has to be a topic where I might plausibly have a point of view.  Nor can you force me into a repugnant or embarrassing position ("we should kill all members of group X,"), and so on.

I don’t want to have the wrong impression carved into Google forever, devoid of this context, so "my good friend Tyrone" will actually write the post.  My father wanted to name me that, but my mom had the good sense to resist and so Tyler it was. 

If you look, in fact, at emergency room statistics, you’ll see that more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites–which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry as much about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end.

Does that follow?  Here is the blog, and thanks to Lynne Kiesling for the pointer.

Here are the images, thanks to Virginia Postrel, and it seems you can get a MarginalRevolution.com T-shirt for $18.

One MR reader has suggested that I blog more about topics I know little or nothing about.  Let us try an experiment.  The comments are open for your suggestions.  The first topic that is mentioned by three different commentators will be blogged about soon for a few days running, or for as long as I can manage.  Obscene and libelous options do not count, and perhaps I will have to rule out the physically impossible ("what is the best Serbian translation of War and Peace"?) as well.  Who knows, maybe Alex will join in with a post or two…

Addendum: Ladies and gentleman, we have a winner.  Read the comments.  If you feel you missed a chance to vote, I will run this experiment again soon.

I’ve been thinking of turning my Ethnic Dining Guide into a blog.  It would be searchable by category and would allow for comments.  It would be updated regularly rather than every six months.  Can you give me any software advice?  Is Typepad the best choice?  I need a large number of categories and the ability to update posts without spending huge amounts of time searching.  And could readers print the whole thing out without it running into hundreds of pages?  Comments are open…

For some goods, the main cost of buying the product is not the price but rather the time it takes to use them. Only about 0.2% of consumer spending in the U.S., for example, went for Internet access in 2004 yet time use data indicates that people spend around 10% of their entire leisure time going online….we calculate that consumer surplus from the Internet may be around 2% of full-income, or several thousand dollars per user. This is an order of magnitude larger than what one obtains from a back-of-the-envelope calculation using data from expenditures.

Here is the paper.  I call it a good start, but let us not forget the Internet also brings price closer to marginal cost in many markets.  Your on-line searching has external benefits for others.  Or how about another paper: "What is the iPod worth?"  TiVo?  The more we are changing the use of our time, the less we can trust real income statistics.

I have been intrigued to learn how many of you have secret blogs.  A secret blog is read by others, but the readers (ostensibly) don’t know who is writing it.  I have been told I should start a secret blog (what was the underlying psychological hypothesis behind this suggestion?) 

What might such a blog consist of?

1. Detailed, quantitative macroeconomic forecasts.

2. Steamy erotic writing.

3. A running and uncensored narrative of my inner mental life (NB: not the same as #2).

4. Exclusive attention to the economics of love, marriage, and sex, in slightly more risque form.

5. The posts I write for MR but reject out of either prudence or fear you will be bored.

The bottom line: This idea will have to wait. 

But if you are willing to write about your secret blog, or "your friend’s" secret blog, comments are open and anonymous remarks are welcome.  Why do people write secret blogs?  And do they subconsciously wish to be discovered by at least a select few?

Arnold Kling says no:

My prediction is that in niches where the ratio of information value to entertainment value is high, blogs will prove to be superior mechanisms for disseminating news. For example, local politics tends to have lower entertainment value than national politics. To me, that implies that at some point we will start to see elections for school board or city council influenced more by coverage in blogs than by coverage in newspapers.

Here is his description of how the blogosphere works (should work?):

This filtering process makes all of us more efficient. Information with low value does not travel far. Information with high general value tends to travel the farthest. Information with low general value but high local value tends to reach interested people but then die out because as it gets passed along its value decays below the threshold. Everyone tends to receive information with a high value to them, and they avoid having to read information that has low value to them. If the filtering system works well, I get to read lots of economic insights, and I never have to read anything about, say, Olympic figure skating.

Here is my earlier post on how blogs influence the world.

I have long feared this development:

Verizon, Comcast, and their ilk have been lobbying Congress to
transform the Internet into a two-tiered system. By tagging content,
broadband providers would ensure that their own packets (or those from
companies paying them protection money) get preferential treatment and
reach subscribers faster than second-tier content. This would give
companies like Verizon a tremendous advantage as they roll out their
own television and VoIP telephone services.

Telco-cable companies have spent billions to lay down broadband pipe
and want a return on their investment. They are tired of bandwidth hogs
like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft getting a free ride. This was fine
when the Internet consisted mostly of e-mail and static Web pages. With
the advent of online video, Internet telephony, and IPTV, Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth want content providers to share the cost.
Their reasoning: If Google is going to introduce a video service,
shouldn’t it have to pay for some of the bandwidth it scarfs down?

…If the telcos and cable companies get their way, we’ll have a
Balkanized Web. Content providers who can afford to pay for premium
service will market superior products to consumers with fast
connections. Everyone else will make do with second-class companies at
second-class speeds.

There is much more in this fascinating article.  In purely economic terms, the idea of charging Google or other "bandwidth hogs" does not sound outrageous.  (What would the incidence of such a price hike be?  Would cable connections become cheaper, or do the cable companies have too much mononpoly power?)  But in public choice terms, this would bring politically-influenced pricing.  Don’t expect porn or blogs to get a break.  The net would become much more corporate.  The perils of regulation aside, Verizon probably would favor its own products, and no, Harold Demsetz never disproved this tendency. 

The beauty of the status quo is that web sites compete on the basis of consumer surplus alone.  The bandwidth costs end up as a fixed charge on net access as a whole; I suspect this hits many inelastic demanders, a’la the Ramsey rules for optimal taxation.  Admittedly it may be a bad deal for the poor who cannot afford to connect, but the overall arrangement enhances the long-run "competition of ideas" feature of the net.

One second-best solution is to charge users for bandwidth per se, while not discriminating across differing uses of that bandwidth.  In essence this would tax file-sharing while leaving most content decisions unaltered.  Alternatively, a tiered net could lead to more Wi-Fi networks, whether at the municipal level or constructed by Google.  If that is where we are headed anyway, this apparently troubling development could rebound to our collective advantage.  We might end up bearing the fixed costs of the transition sooner than is optimal, but again the dynamic benefits of the new arrangement might swamp that problem.

Comments are open…will my free market readers defend Verizon’s right to charge Google bandwidth fees?

Here is the link, I am told that many of these podcasts concern business and economics books.  I am excited by podcasts, but only in the abstract.  I can read faster than you can, but I cannot listen any faster; the rest is comparative advantage.  If you know of other good economics-related podcasts, please tell us in the comments.  Here is a list of Slate-recommended (non-economics) podcasts.  Here are recommendations from Michael at www.2blowhards.com; these include the excellent Radio Economics.  Interviews with Krugman and Sachs are new on that site.

Dan Drezner is a dangerous guy.  Read more here on face/image recognition, check out your favorite bloggers and who they resemble, and then run the test on yourself.  By the way, here is a photo of Arvo.

Addendum: For Alex it generates…er…only Paula Radcliffe.  He deserves at least Grace Kelly.

A real picture from The Snowflake.