Category Media
What will really old, stupid, and uneducated people do?
Typepad puts almost all my comments in spam. Me! Don't they know who I am? I can fish them out of the spam filter when it's my own post, but it means I have given up commenting on other people's posts, both here and on other blogs, if they use Typepad. Because my comments go […]
Copy/paste/re-write; student essays as collages
This is not about economics. Maybe it's about teaching. Maybe it's about the internet. I only have anecdata, and it is compromised by sample selection bias. I don't have any theory, and I don't have a proposed policy.
The economics of paywalls
With on-line advertising revenues stagnant at best, and print in terminal decline, newspapers are starting to build paywalls. The economics of on-line media is a little different from the economics of print, and a lot different from the economics of, say, potatoes. The difference is shown in the diagram below.
“The Invisible Hand” on CBC radio
CBC radio is running a new program this summer on economics; it's called "The Invisible Hand". The first episode is scheduled to be broadcast Wednesday morning (this Wednesday – June 27) at 9:30 am and will be re-broadcast the following Saturday morning at 11:00 am. (Half an hour later in Newfoundland, of course.) I am […]
Why the distribution of reality is skewed and so newspapers are biased towards bad news
"News" is the difference between what happens and what you expected to happen. If you have rational, and hence unbiased, expectations, then the news, on average, should be neither good nor bad. The good news and the bad news should cancel out. So why does the news that gets reported seem mostly bad news? Does […]
Real wages during the recession
I've seen a few stories about recent trends in wages, and too many of them seem to be trying to make a big deal out of movements that – when in put in context – are really too small to say much of anything. [Updated in an almost-certainly futile attempt to combat confirmation bias.]
Reality TV as union busting?
TV writers and actors get paid decent money, because they're unionized. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists's contract specifies fees for every type of TV appearance. Reality TV stars are not "television and radio artists" and do not need to be paid union rates. Reality television shows can feature non-union performers without violating AFTRA agreements. This […]
The Fed’s Dark Age communications strategy
One sentence in Fed vice-chair Janet Yellen's speech caught my eye: "Indeed, I believe that the Federal Reserve qualifies as one of the most transparent central banks in the world." That is total bullshit. The Fed is one of the least transparent central banks in the world. Ironically, in the excellent paragraph immediately following her […]
Literary You-genics
In days of old, literature was subject to strict population controls. As John A Hobson put it back in 1910: "Before the arts of printing and of reading became common, most of the great deeds of man, his finest thoughts, his noblest feelings, perished for lack of enduring record and easy accurate communication…. Almost all that […]
The rise of the public economist
Canadian Business blogger Andrew Potter calls it the economists' election. "This is the first election," he writes, "in which a large number of Canadian economists are making direct, unmediated, real-time interventions into the debates over policy and the various party platforms." The obvious story is that technological change has made it possible for economists to […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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