How will the web affect TV shows?

Shortly you will be able to see Lost episodes for free on the web, albeit with commercials (btw, my theory is that they have entered a parallel universe and are being tested by a non-omnipotent God).  I’ve bought Battlestar Galactica episodes through iTunes. 

But how will this affect the content of TV programs?  I see a few possibilities:

1. Individual episodes are more complex and less likely to be self-contained.  To watch only one show of Lost or BSG leaves you baffled.  But who can make sure he catches every episode?  What if you want to leave the country for a while?  Now if you have missed a show, you can use the Web to keep in touch with the longer and more integrated story.  You will do this even if you, like I, find web viewing distasteful and inconvenient.  Not everyone can afford TiVo, and some of us still need Yana to operate the remote and indeed the service itself.

This mechanism will raise the intellectual quality of TV.

2. Perhaps the time lengths of programs will vary more.  Has The Sopranos gone on a nearly two-year hiatus?  How about a fifteen-minute web shortie to keep us interested?

3. (Some) webcasts will be reproducible on iPods.  You will show the highlights of episodes to your friends.  Perhaps many producers will make episodes to stress "the best two minute stretch or skit" rather than the show as a whole.  Just as the song is outliving the album, perhaps the skit will outlive the show.

4. Might it, as Mark Cuban suggests, support soap operas in real time?  What better to watch on your work computer, during work hours?  In the longer run, the more entertaining your computer becomes, the more people will be paid by commission; blame blogs for that too.

5. TV on the web, in essence, shortens the release window for ancillary products.  How big a deal is the DVD in six months’ time if a web version exists now?  And what does shortening the release window do?  It will be harder to figure out what is a hit.  It will lower movie budgets.  It will increase the relative advantage that low-cost drama has over special effects spectaculars.  Surely you can think of more effects on this count.

Comments are open…

The Gender Imbalance Disequilibrium

China’s gender imbalance is now 117 boys for every 100 girls and for second and third children (when allowed) the imbalance can be as high as 151 boys for every 100 girls.  Millions of men, perhaps 15% of the population, may not be able to find wives.

"The world has never before seen the likes of the
bride shortage that will be unfolding in China in the decades ahead," says AEI demographer Nicholas Eberstadt.

The Chinese government has responded by making selective abortion illegal and by giving significant bonuses to parents of girls.  Yet blackmarket ultrasound is available and, according to 60 Minutes, in demand.  Some reports suggest that the gender imbalance is increasing.

Yet from the perspective of evolutionary fitness having a girl in China is now much better than having a boy.  Boys who can’t find mates won’t be giving their parents any grandchildren.  Will it take a generation of parents without grandchildren for evolutionary incentives to kick in?  Why hasn’t this happened already?  How hard is it to figure out that having a boy, especially if you are poor, means the end of your lineage?

Hat tip to Paul Rubin for pointing out this puzzle to me.

Markets in everything — Scriabin rising

Screenings of Colin Farrell’s latest film will be accompanied by a series of smells at a cinema in Japan.

Seven fragrances will waft from machines under back row seats during historical adventure The New World [TC: much underrated, but you need the big screen].

A floral smell will accompany love scenes, with a mixture of peppermint and rosemary for tear-jerking moments.

Cinemas across the country will be able to download
programmes to control various sequences of fragrances for other
upcoming films.

Illegal downloading and competition from the small screen will encourage further moves into live experiences which cannot be replicated at home.  Anyone up for a live voodoo ceremony?  Note, however, that a programmable home version provides "aromatheraphy" for work or horoscope readings.  Here is the story.

Department of Uh-Oh, a continuing series

Reading web sites raises my estimate of the benefits of being already married:

Half of all women make their minds up within 30 seconds of meeting a man
about whether he is potential boyfriend material, according to a study
on speed-dating.

The women were on average far quicker at making a decision than the
men
[emphasis added] during some 500 speed dates at an event organised as part of
Edinburgh Science Festival.

The scientists behind the research said this showed just how
important chat-up lines were in dating. They found that those who were
"highly skilled in seduction" used chat-up lines that encouraged their
dates to talk about themselves in "an unusual, quirky way".

The top-rated male’s best line was [TC: yikes, and what kind of British abomination is this?] "If you were on Stars In Their
Eyes, who would you be?", while the top-rated female asked bizarrely:
"What’s your favourite pizza topping?"

Failed Casanovas were those who offered up hackneyed comments like "Do
you come here often?", or clumsy attempts to impress, such as "I have a
PhD in computing".

Here is the link, and yes sadly I prefer my pizza plain.  Perhaps some of you must now, over longer periods of time, simply blog your potential conquests into submission.  By the way, the researchers also suggest that "travel" is the best topic of conversation for spurring a connection and future dates.

The Neapolitan Enlightenment

No, it has nothing to do with debt-collecting strategies of the Sopranos.  Rather it refers to the kind of book I dream ofThe Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760, by John Robertson, compares the Neapolitan and Scottish Enlightenments.

There is Ferdinando Galiani, the brilliant midget who understood supply and demand, outlined subjective value theory, formulated an early version of the price-specie flow mechanism, and yet opposed freedom of the grain trade.

Antonio Genovesi held the first European chair of political economy.  He believed economic growth was the path to happiness.  No clergy were allowed in the post.

Giambattista Vico — well, where does one start?  History is cyclic, rhetoric is all-important, poetry is a primary source of knowledge, and the Cartesian method does not apply to the public sphere.  He believed, correctly, that the true wisdom of mankind could be received through a sufficiently deep reading of Homer.  The history of ideas is never quite the same after reading Vico. 

If you want to know how these people relate to Hume and Bayle, this is your book.  It does not go far enough or deep enough — why so little talk of Plato and the Gnostics? — but it is about time we can hold something like this in our hands.  In the meantime we should get this guy to publish his stuff.

The best idea I heard today

…in a wonderful but still unpublished paper titled "Should Taxes Be Independent of Age?" my Harvard colleague Michael Kremer suggests that younger workers should face lower income tax rates than older workers.

Quite simply the elasticities of the young are larger; Greg Mankiw has more.  Get this:

Kremer estimates that young workers are about four times more responsive to work incentives than the middle aged.

The benefits, and costs, of anxiety

I don’t worry much, so it is good I survived my 20s:

Using the survey to follow the fortunes of 5,362 people born in 1946,
the researchers found that those individuals who had higher anxiety –
as determined by the opinion of their school teacher when they were 13
– were significantly less likely to die in accidental circumstances
before they were 25 (only 0.1 per cent of them did) than were
non-anxious people (0.72 per cent of them did). Similar trends were
observed when anxiety was measured using the teachers’ anxiety
judgments when the sample were 15-years-old, or using the sample’s own
completion of a neuroticism questionnaire when they were 16. By
contrast, anxiety had no association with the number of non-accidental
(e.g. illness-related) deaths before 25. “Our findings show, for the
first time in a representative sample of humans, a relatively strong
protective effect of trait anxiety”, the researchers said.

It’s
not all good news for anxious people though. After the age of 25 they
started to show higher mortality rates than calmer types thanks to
increased illness-related deaths.

Here is the link and also the paper.  Elsewhere on BPS Digest, the language you speak influences your personality.

Sex ratios matter

That is a more general way of putting my immigration point from two days ago.  Prevailing debates focus on the number of immigrants, or perhaps their legality, but there is a broader point.

Do we want more men or more women?  Having women around improves the behavior of the men.  On the other hand, if you fear Hispanic culture and its sheer numbers, lots of rootless men may be the best we can do.  They won’t have many children.  Then you should be a little happier with the status quo than many people are. 

If you are a cosmopolitan, you might be willing to accept lower numbers of immigrants in return for more women, or a higher percentage of women.  This could mean larger numbers of American-born Latinos in the long run and of course fewer suffering "old maids" (you can attain this status by your early twenties) back in Mexico.

Leisure time is growing, and becoming more unequal

Julie Schor and others have spread the myth that people have less leisure time than before.  Here is yet another smackdown of that claim:

In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we show that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. Alternatively, the "consumption equivalent" of the increase in leisure is valued at 8 to 9 percent of total 2003 U.S. consumption expenditures. We also find that leisure increased during the last 40 years for a number of sub-samples of the population, with less-educated adults experiencing the largest increases. Lastly, we document a growing "inequality" in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete.

Here is the paper, and the link.

Trading up

How is this for a scheme?:

My name is Kyle MacDonald and I am trying to trade one red paperclip for a house. I started with one red paperclip on July 12th, 2005 and I am making a series of trades for bigger or better things.  My current item up for trade is one year in Phoenix.  Do you want one year of FREE rent in Phoenix?  Pop your offer over to me at ([email protected])… You can see the current offers here.  I live in Montreal Canada but will go anywhere in the world for the right offer.

But has he melted down his pennies?  Here is the web site, which chronicles the trades so far.  No, I cannot prove this is real but the story seems to pan out.  Thanks to Robert Saunders for the pointer.

Should you melt down your pennies?

My much-beloved Financial Times gets one wrong:

It could soon be worth Americans melting down their pennies for scrap, if zinc and copper prices continue their current rate of increase.

Copper prices have risen 30 per cent so far this year, and zinc is up 55 per cent – a rise of about $550 a tonne in a little more than three weeks.

A rise by the same magnitude would make the metal content in the US one cent coin worth more than its face value.

The weight of 160 pennies – also known as a one cent coin – comes to a pound, worth a face value of $1.60. But – with each penny made of 97.5 per cent zinc and 2.5 per cent copper – based on current prices, the metal value is worth about $1.36. Therefore another 25 cents-a-pound rise in zinc, or about $551 a tonne, would see the metal value of the US penny worth more than the monetary value.

We all know, of course, that you should not exercise an option before its expiration.  The longer time runs, the greater the chance for price to bounce around.  Once you are "out of the money," further drops in price don’t hurt you any.  But "in the money," you gain from price movements in your favor.  So hold onto those pennies and wait.  Yes there are complications (what is the stochastic process governing these prices?) but most likely the standard result holds up.

MR Logo Contest!

Is there a market in everything?  We hope so because Marginal Revolution would like a logo!  The logo would jazz up our banner and be used on other websites.  You can find some examples of what we have in mind here.

Tyler and I are consumers of art but not very good suppliers.  We are much more confident in our readers and their friends and contacts so we are holding a contest.  Send us your logo ideas.

The best idea will win $250 and potential fame and glory!

The contest will be open for two weeks.

The Tyranny of the Alphabet

In economics there is a norm that authors are listed alphabetically.  The norm is surprisingly strong and deviations are punished.  On my first paper with Eric Helland we tossed for first authorship, I won, and we noted the names were listed in random order.  Believe it or not, Helland’s tenure committee grilled him on this point and as a result we switched to alphabetical ordering on all our subsequent papers.  Citation counts, however, are historically assigned only to the first listed author and later listed authors are often buried under the et al. monster. 

Do you think these effects are too tiny to matter?  Take a look at the Yellow Pages and see how many firms choose A-names, AA-names, and AAA-names.  Even more surprisingly, a new paper (free, working version, Winter 06, JEP) demonstrates that these effects have important consequences for careers in economics.  Faculty members in top departments with surnames beginning with letters earlier in the alphabet are substantially more likely to be tenured, be fellows of the Econometrics Society, and even win Nobel prizes (let’s see, Arrow, Buchanan Coase…hmmm).  No such effects are found in psychology where the alphabetical norm is not followed.

I’m delighted that my young co-author, Amanda Agan, has a great career ahead of her but if Helland wins the Nobel I am going to be very annoyed.

It’s time to end the tyranny of the alphabet!  The AER should announce a name randomization policy unless authors otherwise instruct.  Barring that, I wish henceforth be known as Alex Abarrok.