Results for “puffin” 69 found
Assorted links
Three weeks of Vox.com
Melissa Bell surveys three weeks of Vox and asks what you think. A few things strike me:
1. One of their innovations — which has occasioned lots of hostility — has been to shift the window of what is considered “reportable as accepted truth.” A MSM article does not put defenders and opponents of evolutionary theory on the same footing. Vox presents the workability of a health care mandate as something — if not quite to be taken for granted — as a matter where a pro-mandate journalistic stance can be considered a matter of fact. By no means do I agree with all of their judgments, but I see them as ahead of the curve and outflanking their critics.
2. The site looks great, works great, and they are consistently finding interesting topics to report on, at a higher rate than most better-established MSM outlets. If I go to the site I will find something new I didn’t know about, every day. I don’t feel a need to push them into an RSS feed. By the way, the site looks especially good on an iPad.
3. When I was in fifth grade, I was pulled out of some of the more boring classes and give “SRAs” to work with. SRAs were color coded material laid out on a series of cards and boxed tabs, which could be manipulated and re-ordered if the student so chose, and which allowed progression to increasing levels of difficulty. Vox.com reminds me of SRAs, and of some of the instructional theories of the 1960s, although of course on the web and thus with a superior presentation. I preferred SRAs to class, but anything I like is to be considered suspect from a broader market point of view. By the way, IBM eventually sold the SRA brand name and content to McGraw-Hill.
4. With any site you have to ask where the “pandering element” comes in. With MR the TC pandering is to yours truly — the unpaid author — and it comes in the form of puffins, Japan, movie reviews, and obscure Straussian references, among other things which make me giggle. With Vox the pandering is highly factual and tonally neutral coverage of some hot button issues, such as the racism of Donald Sterling or telling your parents your true profession (porn star). This strategy likely will succeed, although those articles tend not to interest me personally. I think they will do pretty well on Facebook and other social media sites.
5. I am most worried about a certain uniformity of voice across the articles. Think of the headings, photos, and prose style as geared to put the links high in eventual Google searches. But readers miss the presence of distinctive voices, including Matt and Ezra themselves, who of course have served this role in the past. I’ve liked all of Matt’s articles for Vox so far, but I miss hearing Matt. You know, the Matt of mattyglesias.typepad.com and wisecracks about the Wizards. Slate and Salon are full of voices, and they have found this to be a successful formula, at least relative to the alternatives if not always in terms of net revenue.
I’ve liked Joseph Stromberg’s science coverage, and been impressed by his depth, but he does not (yet?) ring as a distinct voice in my mind. I don’t even have an illusory picture of what he might be like, and I wonder if their writers can continue to attract readers with such a relatively low level of vividness. (On the other hand, this limits the bargaining power of the writers!) Yet can the writers be given greater voice while keeping the Google maximization strategy in place?
Over time this uniformity of tone also will make it hard for them to recruit or keep top writers or writers looking for a path to the top. And every outlet needs a few of these writers, even if many of the pieces are to be more cookie-cutter in presentation.
6. Costs will rise when they send people outside of the office to do stories, as eventually they must.
7. I am still a pessimist about the long-term economics of media, and I remain unconvinced they have solved the key problem of a weak advertising market for on-line material. Still, I am keen to see how they will extend the site.
What I’ve been reading
1. Andrew Hussey, The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and its Arabs. Probably you should read a book on this topic, and this book is it.
2. Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. An excellent study of one episode in the history of environmental catastrophe. Overall, the environment remains understudied in economic history or for that matter public choice.
3. Elliot A. Rosen, Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and the Economics of Recovery. Chapter twelve is a fascinating look at the debates over Alvin Hansen’s “secular stagnation” thesis. It is uncanny how much the exact same debates are being replayed today.
4. Dominic Couzens and Mark Sisson, The Secret Lives of Puffins. Unlike many sea birds, puffins are quiet, and their divorce rate is in the range of seven to nine percent. Excellent photos in this one.
5. John Keay, Midnight’s Descendants: A History of South Asia since Partition. A very good treatment of how much work remains to be done in the “nation building” enterprise in South Asia. Recommended.
Assorted links
1. Puffin holding flower (Proposing puffin).
2. Andrew Wylie on Amazon and other matters. Angus Deaton on replication.
3. Iceland is no longer doing better in terms of gdp than Latvia or Estonia or Ireland.
5. The favorite albums of Pope Francis. He has very good taste in pieces and performances both. And seventeen Janet Yellen papers that you can read about at this link.
Assorted links
Notes from Iceland
The restaurant scene is much improved, compared to nineteen years ago, though don’t expect much in the way of vegetables. Reykjavik seems to have an excessive capital stock relative to current income. Natasha finds it hard to get decaffeinated coffee. The tap water is superb and, on weekends, only two people work in what is the world’s second largest geothermal plant. Icelandic horses and ponies look quite genetically distinct. Puffins fly faster than you might expect. It is back to being an expensive country.
Overall I see a society on the verge of a massive and permanent transformation. The Icelanders face two questions rather immediately. First, will they allow mass tourism, with its cultural and environmental implications? (Most likely they will, if only because they don’t know how to stop it.) Second, will they allow continuing or perhaps even accelerating immigration?, noting that the current population (not all native Icelanders) is only about 320,000. A relatively small amount of immigration, or tourism for that matter, would make for a big cultural change, most likely with no way of turning back, for better or worse. High-skilled immigration alone could do it. It is already the case that the biggest association of Icelandic horses worldwide is in Germany, namely the Islandpferde-Reiter- und Züchterverband.
Wikipedia claims that Icelandic has no unique word for “pony.”
My favorite things Iceland
1. Saga: First choice goes to Njal’s Saga. It’s the clearest and crispest of the lot.
2. Novel, modern: How about Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s The Greenhouse? This is a boom area. There are one hundred twenty Icelandic novels translated into German each year [correction of earlier estimate].
3. Popular music: Sigur Ros, Agaetis Byrjun. This CD has a transcendental and also anthemic sound, even if the group never quite lived up to their initial promise. Bjork albums I usually find pretentious and I would rather listen to her earlier group The Sugar Cubes.
4. Annual tournament: Ram groping.
5. Sea bird: The puffin, followed by the guillemot.
6. Video: Daniel Tammet learns how to speak Icelandic in a week. That’s hard.
7. Economist: Erik Brynjolfsson, although I do not believe he was born in Iceland.
8. Movie: Maybe 101 Reyjkavik? I have yet to see The Deep.
9. Movie, set in: Die Another Day, an underrated Bond movie in my view.
10. Vista: How about Höfn?
I am excited that we are arriving this morning. And as for the food, don’t forget the glories of skyr.
Very good sentences the culture that is Iceland
Seven-year-old Jón Haukur Vignisson unexpectedly won the highest score among non-professionals in the annual national ram groping tournament organized by the Sheep Farming Museum in Hólmavík, the Strandir region in the West Fjords, last weekend.
The article is short but interesting throughout, every line a gem and the site has a puffin ad too. Perhaps the hat tip should remain anonymous but I can assure you the person is excellent.
Here is a photo of Hólmavík.
Excess Reserves and Intraday Credit
In my 2008 post, Interpreting the Monetary Base Under the New Monetary Regime, I argued that the massive increase in bank reserves was neither a necessary harbinger of inflation (as people on the right feared) nor a sure sign of a liquidity trap (as people on the left claimed) but rather represented, at least in part, a sensible aspect of the new regime of paying interest on reserves. I wrote:
When no interest was paid on reserves banks tried to hold as few as possible. But during the day the banks needed reserves – of which there were only $40 billion or so – to fund trillions of dollars worth of intraday payments. As a result, there was typically a daily shortage of reserves which the Fed made up for by extending hundreds of billions of dollars worth of daylight credit. Thus, in essence, the banks used to inhale credit during the day – puffing up like a bullfrog – only to exhale at night. (But note that our stats on the monetary base only measured the bullfrog at night.)
Today, the banks are no longer in bullfrog mode. The Fed is paying interest on reserves and they are paying at a rate which is high enough so that the banks have plenty of reserves on hand during the day and they keep those reserves at night. Thus, all that has really happened – as far as the monetary base statistic is concerned – is that we have replaced daylight credit with excess reserves held around the clock.
A post today at Liberty Street Economics, the blog of the New York Federal Reserve illustrates and explains how the excess reserves have reduced transaction costs in the payment system and risk to the Federal Reserve.
The last chart shows the level of intraday credit extended by the Federal Reserve to Fedwire participants, measured as the daily maximum amount extended by the Federal Reserve. There has been a dramatic decline in the amount of credit extended since the expansion of reserve balances in October 2008. The reduced level of daylight credit has the benefit of reducing the risk exposure of Federal Reserve Banks, as well as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) fund. Indeed, the expected losses to that fund would be greater if some of the assets of a failed bank had been pledged to a Federal Reserve Bank to collateralize a daylight overdraft, as the collateral would not be available to pay other creditors of the bank. With a greater amount of reserves in the system, banks largely “prepay” for their liquidity needs by maintaining large reserve balances with which to fund their outgoing payments.
Assorted links
1. Good background on Sargent and Sims.
2. Lost puffin found in sex clinic, and David Warsh baits Greg Ransom.
3. How doctors die.
5. Will Japan and Russia clone a woolly mammoth?
6. A total coincidence, but here is a list of the most corrupt eurozone countries. And I am still skeptical, but it seems markets really like the new Italian austerity plan.
Assorted links
2. One year anniversary of IHS Kosmos video, podcast, and informational site. Here is my short video on academic publishing.
3. Are puffins a cyclical asset, attracted by undervalued real exchange rates? Sadly this piece never considers an economic explanation for the phenomenon under study.
4. Is Japanese health care falling apart?
5. Alesina and Giavazzi on Italy.
6. Who are the world’s biggest employers?
7. Time inconsistent budget agreements.
8. Be very careful comparing poverty line changes over time.
Assorted links
1. An environmentalist perspective on The Great Stagnation.
2. A history of Christian rock.
3. Did the stimulus destroy jobs on net? (pdf)
4. The etymology of inflation, and also here.
5. Markets in everything: Barbara’s Bakery Peanut Butter Puffin Cereal.
Assorted links
2. Stepping into the Wilkinson-Caplan debate on kids, and here.
3. Via Chris F. Masse, new quantum teleportation results.
4. Skeptical response on the origin of language.
5. Markets in everything: The Inflatable Crowd Company.
Assorted links
Assorted links and non-links
1. The economics of old vs. new art markets.
2. Many people are recommending Johanna Blakely's TED talk, on "fashion's free culture," but Turkey finds it of questionable moral value and will not let me view it or link to it.
3. Top ten lessons of the global economic meltdown.
4. Why were some countries hit harder than others?
5. The increasing value of academic teamwork (he could have mentioned textbooks too!).
6. Puffincam.
7. Art Linkletter: an American life.