Australian reader Jeremy Hagan points to a sign of the economic slowdown down under: Television stations have started carrying ads touting the benefits of television advertising.
It’s kind of like miles of highways where all the billboards are just ads for renting billboard space.
Photo: zyzzyvaWhat signs of the slowdown have you seen lately?
The Forever Portfolio, spotted this week in the Nashville airport.Our friend James Altucher has a new book out, The Forever Portfolio, which is an investment book — the subtitle is “How to Pick Stocks That You Can Hold for the Long Run” — but it is also full of James Altucher stories about poker-playing and idea-generating and other stuff, most of which is generally great. Here’s one review.
It may seem like bad timing to come out with a stock-picking book in the midst of a gruesome bear market. Or maybe it is great timing.
The book is full of sub-rosa and counterintuitive investment ideas. I liked the book a lot; in fact, I wrote the foreword. Here’s an excerpt:
James is especially good at making silk purses from sows’ ears. He finds the upside in identity theft, obesity, bot armies, and traffic fatalities. Some may grumble that he is ghoulish, preying on American vices and weakness in order to profit. That is a moral argument best addressed in a different kind of book than this one.
Economic historian Price Fishback, who recently guest blogged about the original Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, is back for an encore. This time, he tackles the issue of whether the New Deal and World War II are good examples of Keynesian stimuli.
I always thought they were; but using data, Fishback makes a simple and compelling case that they are not.
I learned a lot from his piece, and I suspect many of you will as well. In my opinion, this sort of writing is exactly what academic economists should be doing to help shape the public debate.
What Do the New Deal and World War II Tell Us About the Prospects for a Stimulus Package?
By Price Fishback
A Guest Post
Everybody is talking about the stimulus package, and many are citing the New Deal and World War II as classic examples of successful stimulus programs. In punditry history, the federal government spent large amounts of money on works projects in the 1930’s and munitions in the 1940’s, and these were important stimuli to the American economy. Readers should beware, because the history is more complicated than the two-line descriptions. Read more…
Very, it would seem.
This isn’t exactly a surprise. Obama campaigned hard on the subject. But a couple of personnel moves in recent days suggest that, despite the cratering economy, the administration is also eager to tackle the energy/global warming issues.
The first move is the ouster of John Dingell as chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, to be replaced by Henry Waxman.
Both men are Democrats, but Dingell is from the old school, and from Michigan, with a reputation for being auto-industry friendly; Waxman, from California, is an avowed environmentalist. (To be reductive: Dingell is gas-powered while Waxman is wind-powered.) Between this switch and the rejection (for now) of the Big Three’s plea for Congressional aid, the gas-burning car paradigm looks headed for a shift. Read more…
Somali pirate town Boosaaso. (Photo: Jehad Nga/The New York Times)Who’s making money from the piracy that’s flourishing off the coast of Somalia?
The pirates themselves seem to be raking it in. As the Guardian reports, pirates have made about $30 million from ransom payments this year, according to U.N. estimates; and they are demanding $25 million for the return of their latest capture, the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star.
Increased piracy also provides a welcome revenue stream for private military contractors like Blackwater Worldwide. As Wired reports, Blackwater hires itself out like mercenaries of centuries past to protect ships against pirates. Anti-Piracy Maritime Security Solutions, for example, charges $30,000 per boat for its piracy protection, according to NPR.
Another piracy profiteer: coastal Somali villages.
In the Somali fishing town Eyl — the “piracy capital of the world” — the local economy is booming, thanks to the 12 foreign ships being held hostage off its coast by hundreds of pirates who bring their business — using plundered money — to the village.
New businesses in the town, including hotels built to accommodate pirates, are dependent on its criminal economy. The Guardian quotes one of the town’s tea vendors:
When the pirates have money, I can easily increase my price to $3 for a cup.
It is good to see that inflation is alive and well somewhere.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is increasing the space between rows of seats on its planes. I’m not surprised — the Dutch are the tallest people on earth these days, as I discovered when I had to crane my neck around the Brobdingnagians in front of me in an Amsterdam movie theater.
Like many Europeans, the Dutch are also very concerned about the environment. As the KLM example illustrates, though, the good nutrition that makes them (and other Northern Europeans) so tall imposes negative externalities on the environment: Fewer Dutchmen per plane flight means more fuel consumed per passenger, and more pollution. The higher weight that goes with extra height requires more calories to maintain, generating more pollution to produce the tall person’s food.
So maybe we Americans are doing our part for the environment by being relatively short. Now if we could also reduce our weight, so that we consume fewer calories (the average American adult is officially classified as overweight, and 30 percent of Americans are classified as obese), we could actually contribute to environmental protection in a way that the tall Europeans cannot!
Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own — it needn’t have anything to do with quotations — send it along here.
Let me continue to solicit suggestions for The Yale Book of Quotations list of the top 10 quotes of 2008. Last year’s winner was “Don’t tase me, bro!” That’s an example of an internet meme — a catchphrase, saying, joke, humorous remark, blooper, etc. — widely propagated through YouTube, blogs, or other internet methods. Were there any similarly viral quotes in 2008?
Since last Wednesday, the torrent of junk e-mail coursing through the internet has been slowed dramatically, with 40 percent or more of it cut off at the source.
The source of all that spam? San Jose, California. That’s where a group of servers responsible for much of the world’s spam had been operating until they were severed from the internet last week.
The servers had controlled some of the world’s biggest botnets, the legions of hijacked personal computers that flood your inbox with ads for male-enhancement drugs.
The shutdown could be a major blow to spammers’ finances. Every day the botnets remain down means revenue lost. But how much revenue? Read more…
Ron PaulWhen we solicited your questions for Congressman Ron Paul shortly after the election, so many questions came in that we split Paul’s answers into two batches, the first of which was published last week.
Here is the second. Like the first batch, they are well-considered and interesting throughout; they will surely make many readers continue to wish fervently for a Paul presidency.
Thanks again to Rep. Paul for his time and insights, and to all of you for the good questions.
Q: What is the first thing the country should do about its monetary policy? Read more…
I often get emails from blog readers asking me to shed light on some issue that, in the mind of the email writer, is a pressing social or economic issue. Sometimes it is a big issue like immigration or the financial crisis. More often it is something less mainstream, like election fraud or an unusual application of incentives.
And then every once in a while there is something so absurd that I am left to wonder what people will think up next. Blog reader Jeff’s email falls into that latter category. He’ll be glad to know that I’ve chosen to omit his last name. Jeff’s interest: jenkem.
I’d never heard of jenkem, and I’m not sure I believe it is for real, but according to media reports, it is the name given to the hallucinogenic recreational drug made by fermenting human excrement. If nothing else, at least it is cheap to make.
Others might shudder at this new development, but I’ve learned to see opportunity where others do not: finally a topic that perfectly blends my own research interests with those of my father. Maybe we can co-author our first research article.
It’s not an entire film (and it’s not in French), but two more readers, Talya and Pavle, have sent in a video of their song “Fannie Mae Eat Freddie Mac and Cheese,” which uses “freakonomics” as a sort of mantra. We like.
Photo: JamesfischerThese are the economic times that try men’s souls, and women’s too. In the past few months, a lot of people have seen their net worth fall substantially, and I’m sure more than a few have contemplated what would happen if they lost everything.
So we asked a group of people — Nick Mills, Josh Piven, Adam Shepard, Will Wilkinson, and Ann Wroe — to consider the following scenario:
Imagine you just lost all your possessions and money, and you were suddenly living in the streets.
1. What’s the first move you would make?
2. What’s the first organization you would turn to?
3. What would your extended plan look like?
Here are their answers. I have to admit, I’ve thought about this scenario myself many times in my life and my answers bear scant resemblance to those given below. I will not go into detail because I don’t want to pollute your reading experience; part of the fun of these quorums is to throw a question out there and be surprised by the answers.
I am, however, interested to hear your comments. And please feel free to tell us how you’d respond to this scenario. Read more…
Blog reader Nick Turner sent along this photo of a Body Shop ad in San Francisco:
Photo: Nick TurnerHe was surprised that the ad guarantees fair-labor conditions for workers in Italy:
I thought fair-trade protections were for third-world workers. I
wonder how the Italians feel about this designation.
The ad didn’t outright call Italy third-world; but if it had, the country would likely have taken offense — as have other countries, states, and even cities:
Australian cricket player Mathew Hayden angered India’s Board of Control for Cricket when he called India “third-world.”
A travel agency’s “Third-World Tour” of Appalachia upset the region’s tourism directors.
And Rep. Tom Tancredo incited anger when he called Miami a “third-world country.”
Cultural anthropologist Philip Herbst calls the term a “catchall” that risks stigmatizing certain geographic areas.
Thesaurus.com still lists it as a synonym for the less-loaded term “developing nation,” but the Urban Dictionary’s reader-generated definitions are outright derogatory.
Has “third-world” turned into an insult or can it still be politically correct?
Eric Oliver is a colleague of mine at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the absolutely fantastic book Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic.
He has some new and interesting insights on the “Bigot Belt,” which he has generously written up for the Freakonomics blog.
The Bigot Belt
By Eric Oliver
A Guest Post
Like many people, I was fascinated by a map recently published by The New York Times illustrating the shifting vote margins between the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections.
Of particular note was the broad swath of counties running from Oklahoma and East Texas through Arkansas to Kentucky and West Virginia where the Republican vote margins actually increased from 2004. How, in an election year so dominated by Democrats, did these counties go from merely “red” to “scarlet”?
The immediate answer to this question seems to be race. “The Deep South still resonates with negative feelings about the race of President-elect Barack Obama,” wrote Adam Nossiter in The Times, quoting various locals of Vernon, Ala., who expressed fear of having a black man “over” them. The implication is that in any place where the Republican vote margin increased, whites are more racially intolerant. Read more…
Photo: lilivanili and shawnzamYesterday I su
