Peter’s Blog

The Illogic of Farm Subsidies, and Other Agricultural Truths - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Among economics programs, I may be biased towards Chicago, but there may be one or two other decent places to learn some useful economics.

Emphasis mine. =)

…we should be worrying about peak helium!

Three Smart Things You Should Know About Helium

if it continues to be consumed at the current rate, it’ll be gone in nine years.

The USA Today, of all papers, has a good summary of worldwide suburbanization trends: Modern suburbia not just in America anymore

This article is just amazing: cityofsound: Transport informatics

And Jack, you’ll like that Boston is doing some cool stuff with biking.

Bike network 2.0
Boston appointed a ‘bike czar’, Nicole Freedman, and her team has used Google Maps to create a set of bike routes across the city, based on the aggregated data from actual routes that cyclists took across the city“We found out where the actual desire lines are,” said Freedman, and has since extended the network to enable users to rate streets for bikes. It’s a little rudimentary at the moment, but shows the promise of such systems. Boston are building the city’s first official bike map from the results of the system.

Big Tax Breaks for Businesses in Housing Bill - New York Times

The Senate proclaimed a fierce bipartisan resolve two weeks ago to help American homeowners in danger of foreclosure. But while a bill that senators approved last week would take modest steps toward that goal, it would also provide billions of dollars in tax breaks — for automakers, airlines, alternative energy producers and other struggling industries, as well as home builders.
The tax provisions of the Foreclosure Prevention Act, which consumer groups and labor leaders say amount to government handouts to big business, show how the credit crisis, while rattling the housing and financial markets, has created beneficiaries in the power corridors of Washington.

It also shows how legislation with a populist imperative offers a chance for lobbyists to press their clients’ interests.

Every day is government handout day!

I attended an interesting lecture last night put on by the University of Chicago GSB alumni club. Professor Erik Hurst gave an interesting talk about pensions. He argues that the old saw that people aren’t saving enough for retirement is false for the vast majority of people. A common reason people think retirees are impoverished is because their food spending, of all things, goes down. However, statistics show that the food they eat stays constant and the time they spend shopping and preparing food goes up – they’ve replaced expensive prepared food with raw ingredients that they prepare themselves. So know you know why grandparents everywhere seem to spend their entire days at the supermarket!

So who doesn’t have enough money for retirement? It’s approximately 20% of the population (in most OECD countries), and most of them have ‘involuntarily’ retired. Why retire involuntarily? Normally it is because of a ‘health shock’ (great phrase), in which bad health both costs people a lot of money and prevents them from returning to work. So, these people stop working earlier than they hoped to (or need to) and, at the same time, most countries have good insurance for health expenses but little for lost income.

Pretty interesting, huh? There’s also some interesting research Hurst did on the economics of bling.

BBC NEWS | UK | ‘Bring on the property crash’

I understand that it’s hard to buy a house in the UK when you’re young and making a basic salary. But what’s unsaid in this article is that you have people earning £20k a year (like one IT worker profiled) and people thinking it’s a good salary. It’s long been my conviction that British purchasing power is shit: numerical costs are only slightly lower, thanks to the strong pound, but wages are much lower. I would MUCH rather earn $40k in the US than £20k in the UK.

Bernanke Nods at Possibility of a Recession - New York Times

In his bleakest economic assessment to date, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Wednesday that the American economy could contract in the first half of 2008, meeting the technical definition of a recession, and he encouraged Congress to help homeowners caught up in the mortgage crisis.

Unemployment is going up, the housing market is in freefall, the currency keeps sliding, you have just offered unprecedented loan guarantees of tens of billions of dollars to (previous) titans of the the financial industry – why yes, the economy just might, perhaps, potentially, eventually, in the worst case, with many qualifications see some trouble! What would really wow me would be if there wasn’t a recession. Way to go to all those ‘prudent’ reporters (The Economist especially) that have held off from saying the US economy is in recession until now.

“Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business”

The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You’re probably experiencing it right now. It’s the basis of virtually all media.

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is “free to air,” and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market.

In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts. This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, “value-added” subscriptions, and direct ecommerce (see wired.com/extras for a complete list). Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.

Great feature piece in Wired’s latest issue by Chris Anderson on why everything is becoming free. What Anderson says here about the media business model being applied to more and more industries ties in a lot with what Tom Foremski has been saying about Silicon Valley becoming Media Valley.

And walking the walk, Wired is giving away the print version of the issue (to the first 10,000). US addresses only, or otherwise I would have signed up. Though I got a year’s subscription to Wired free once with my $20 subscription to Salon, so I’ve already benefited. =)

BBC NEWS | Business | UK in Liechtenstein tax data deal

The UK’s tax authority has confirmed that it has paid an informant for data regarding British citizens who have accounts in tax haven Liechtenstein.

First Germany, now the UK. So much for Liechtenstein’s claims about client confidentiality. Laws are nothing when you have much larger, richer countries willing to pay leakers millions of dollars for secret client lists.