Category: Web/Tech

The World Just Keeps Getting Better

by  Steven Landsburg in

I lost my watch. I wanted to replace it with the exact same model, because I’ve memorized the the pushbutton sequences and I don’t deal well with change. So I went down to the Wal-Mart where I’d bought this watch, oh, probably about six years ago, but Wal-Mart, which deals with change better than I do, had “upgraded” to a more fashionable selection.

So how do you shop for a Casio watch without knowing the model number? And how does your answer change if I tell you that Casio makes over 1000 models?

Answer: You spend about a minute and a half on Google and discover a site called dealtime.com, which knows about every one of those models (and of course about a gazillion other watches from about a gazillion other makers too). Dealtime asks you a bunch of questions about the watch: Digital or analog? Casual or dressy? Square face or circular face? It brings up a page with pictures of the 32 models that fit your criteria. There in the middle of the page is your watch.

You click on the watch, and dealtime brings up a list of five websites where you can buy this model, in a neat little chart showing prices and customer ratings of the sellers. At the top of the list is etronics.com, offering your watch for $14.99. Two days later, you have your watch.

All that technology to sell me a fifteen dollar watch! Oh, God, I love the web.

Steven Landsburg to Guest Blog!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

We are thrilled that Steven Landsburg will be guest blogging at Marginal Revolution over the next week! No one is better at explaining complicated ideas than Steven, his columns and books are a marvel of both clarity and depth. When you read a Landsburg column you first learn why the obvious idea is wrong but uniquely by the time you get to the end of a Landsburg column you also know why the correct idea is obvious! I remember my reaction the first time I read Steven’s explanation of Ricardian Equivalence (in Macroeconomics written with Lauren Feinstone). What a revelation! It’s so obvious! And that was after I already “understood” the idea!

If you read this blog and haven’t read The Armchair Economist and Fair Play, I envy you. You have a treat in store!

The economics of open-source software

by  Tyler Cowen in

What will the world of software look like once the open-source transition is complete?

Some programmers worry that the transition to open source will abolish or devalue their jobs. The standard nightmare is what I call the “Open Source Doomsday” scenario. This starts with the market value of software going to zero because of all the free source code out there. Use value alone doesn’t attract enough consumers to support software development. The commercial software industry collapses. Programmers starve or leave the field. Doomsday arrives when the open-source culture itself (dependent on the spare time of all these pros) collapses, leaving nobody around who can program competently. All die. Oh, the embarrassment!

We have already observed a number of sufficient reasons this won’t happen, starting with the fact that most developers’ salaries don’t depend on software sale value in the first place. But the very best one, worth emphasizing here, is this: when did you last see a software development group that didn’t have way more than enough work waiting for it? In a swiftly changing world, in a rapidly complexifying and information-centered economy, there will always be plenty of work and a healthy demand for people who can make computers do things–no matter how much time and how many secrets they give away.

Here is the full essay, if nothing else it is provocative. It is also beyond my sphere of expertise, but anyone interested in the private provision of public goods should check out this piece.

Thanks to Steven Pearson for the pointer.

New economics blogs

by  Tyler Cowen in

Will the diversity of the blogosphere ever cease?

This morning alone I have learned of three new blogs. The first is on Sabernomics, or econometrics as applied to baseball.

The second is a new blog on economic development issue; read this post on happiness research around the world.

Finally, Johan Norberg, libertarian crusader for global capitalism, posts on his views and efforts on behalf of liberty.

Our Austrian Economist Guest Blogger

by  Alex Tabarrok in

We are delighted that Michael Stastny, author of the excellent Mahalanobis blog, will be guest blogging with us this week. Michael is a true Austrian economist – he studies economics at the University of Vienna! Alas, he tells me that Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Mises are never mentioned in his classes and Hayek wouldn’t get a mention either, except for the fact that he “worked together with Pinochet so closely.” How sad. Truly, one has to come to Vienna, VA to study Austrian economics!

Blog coverage

by  Tyler Cowen in

The ever-excellent Daniel Drezner offers some useful words about how he chooses blog topics.  I speak only for myself, and not for Alex, but here are a few guiding principles behind my blogging choices:

1. Institutions and ideas matter more than particular leaders or candidates.

2. The blogosphere already covers Iraq, gay marriage, and the election — or whatever else is the topic of the day — to an extreme.

3. The intersection of academic learning and public policy is ripe territory.

4. The long-run impact of science on our lives is commonly underrated.

5. Personal attacks, whether on public figures or other bloggers, usually are not very interesting.

6. Some (small) percentage of the posts should be utterly idiosyncratic.

7. Most of all, I should be interested in the topic.

In reality, number seven reigns supreme.

The Economists’ Voice

by  Tyler Cowen in

We–that is, Joe Stiglitz, Aaron Edlin, and I [Brad DeLong]–aim to start an online publication, The Economists’ Voice, to be “published” by Berkeley Economic Press, to try to remedy this situation. The two youngest of us are confident that we have a very good chance of succeeding. Our confidence is based on one fact: Joe Stiglitz thinks that this will work, and his judgment in this area is very good, as is shown by the remarkable success of the Journal of Economic Perspectives which has greatly increased the flow of information across the subfields of economics, and done a remarkable job of welding the American Economic Association into a stronger intellectual community.

The Economists’ Voice will aim for pieces longer than an op-ed and shorter than (and much more readable than) a piece for a standard journal. We thus avoid the op-ed problem–the problem that op-ed space is too short for an argument, and only provides space to be shrill. But we also hope to stay short enough to be readable, and understandable. And we will aim for quick turnaround–days rather than the years of journals.

The level will be non-technical but sophisticated: perhaps what one expects to read in the Financial Times and the news pages of the Wall Street or National Journal, or perhaps a notch above. The aim will be to provide an economist’s argument and point of view on some salient and interesting issue: a survey of something interesting happening in the economy, or a call for some change in policy or institutions–which would consist of a review of what the principal important factors are, what the objective function is, what the constraints are, why the objective function is maximized at the particular set of policies or institutional arrangements that the author prefers.

We will launch the The Economists’ Voice later this year. We will succeed if we become *the* place on the internet where economists, journalists, interested observers, staffers, and others turn in search of high-quality comprehensible economic analysis.

Here is Brad’s full post.

Most of all, something like this is badly needed.

More conceptually, I view this attempt as an implicit criticism of Google. There is nothing stopping economists from posting such writings right now, and of course longer pieces can be linked to. But who will find/read them? How much credibility will those writings carry? So Brad and Co. are betting they will prove better finders, branders, certifiers, and marketers than current institutions.

Is the initial problem one of generating a greater supply of readable but sound content for the web? (“Build it and they will write.”) Or is the problem that of mobilizing audience attention for work that is already being done? (“Build it and they will come.”) A related question is why most established economists have not found blogging to be a useful medium to date.

Should the functions of certifying and commissioning/editing always be combined? What about an additional economics blog or journal that simply selects the best material already out there, analogous to www.aldaily.com or www.artsjournal.com?

Stay tuned…

MR and the Google Wars!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Fabio Rojas, a frequent guest blogger for MR, writes me the following:

There is a young man in Northridge, California whose name is “Fabio Rojas.” He’s a computer programmer from the Dominican Republic. Since about 1996, his personal web page was the one to come up first in Yahoo, Altavista and Google when you entered the words “Fabio Rojas.”

As you can imagine, I was enraged. That’s when I began a silent war waged on the information superhighway. Despite my furor and razor sharp analytical mind, there was nothing I could do to fight his influence. I was losing the war to be the #1 Fabio Rojas on the internet.

Althought I set up my own web page and participated in numerous on line forums, year after year, “Northridge” Rojas’ web page would be the #1 Fabio Rojas web page in the world. I was stymied… as an experienced computer programmer, “Northridge” Rojas” knew how to jack up his google rating to an unsurmountable level. There were even times this past fall when my Indiana University professor profile would momentarily get #1 status, only to be knocked down by his poorly constructed and infrequently updated personal profile. He was obviously messin’ with me.

Today, I looked upon the battle field and found that the tides had turned in a most remarkable fashion. I am now the undisputed #1 Fabio Rojas on the internet. “Northridge” Rojas’ has been routed, and barely shows in the top 10 google hits.

And who can I thank for this reversal in fortune? That’s right, the guys at Marginal Revolution. My post on Football and economics seems to still get some hits, months after it was posted, which encourages people to read my profile and thus vanquish the pretender Rojas.

What can I say?

!Viva la Revolucion Marginalista!

Fabio

Bryan Caplan, our colleague and recent guest blogger, has also been aided by MR in his own Google War. Bryan is the author of an extensive website, The Museum of Communism. It’s an excellent website that he continues to update. Assuming that I outlive him, Bryan has made me promise that in lieu of flowers I will take up a collection to preserve the site in perpetuity! (Logically, he should have asked Robin Hanson to do this but that’s another story).

For a long time Bryan was the number one Google hit on the word Communism but the Marxists later pulled ahead. Bryan’s recent stint as a guest blogger put him in the lead for a while but now I see he is once more number two. So click on the Google link, check out the Museum and do your part to help overthrow the Marxists!