economics – Grey Panthers Savannah

Freakonomics review

gpanther — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:02:00 +0000

I know, I know, I’m quite late to the game (Freakonomics was first published in 2005), but I still feel that this book deserves a review.

What I like about it the most, is the fact that it tries to teach critical thinking, a thing which is lacking these days. The book provides vivid and easy to read descriptions of investigative stories, similar to detective/murder-mystery books, about how seemingly distant events relate to one-another. Each chapter stands on its own and can be read-trough in a short amount of time. Where necessary, the book provides high-level description of the statistical terms (like regression-analysis), without giving the impression of “talking down”.

My favorite quote from the book is actually not from the book authors, but non-the-less I find it very fitting (and I’m sure that the authors agree with me, since they included it in the book :-)):

“We Associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “with what closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes the most to self-esteem.” Economic and social behaviors, Galbraith continued, “are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.”

I consider this book one worth reading. The only negative was that I got the “extended” version (which is not the one I link to) and I found that the “extension” was just some rehashing of the content from the book and from their blog. So get the real thing.

PS. Wikipedia says (so it must be true :-p) that a sequel is coming. I’m looking forward to it! Even if it will be half of the quality of the original (as sequels usually are), it should still be a great read!

Full disclosure: the links include my Amazon Affiliate ID.

Interesting site / videos

gpanther — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:19:00 +0000

I finished watching the Crash Course from ChrisMartenson.com. It is interesting and slightly frightening. Although my BS detector had some faint signal (like saying on the front page “Chris Martenson, PhD”, only to find out on a closer read that he is not a PhD in economics), I’m no economist to judge how accurate the description, but it is interesting to watch. Embedded below for your convenience:

For the final video visit the website. A similarly oriented YouTube channel is the The Byron Dale Channel. Of course caveat emptor, you shouldn’t take anything on face value.

Bulletproof hosting

gpanther — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 10:31:00 +0000

Google not being evil

Economics, protecting the environment and Web 2.0

gpanther — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 17:46:00 +0000

What do these things have in common? During the weekend I was at at a conference of economics (weird, isn’t it?) and one of the presenters talked about how we must look at the economics if we want to achieve a given goal, for example protecting the environment. For example currently the computer manufacturing companies have no incentive to create a long living product because they sell them and their goal is to sell more. However usually we don’t buy computers because we need computers, but because we need some services. What he suggested was that if we would buy the service instead of the object (so that the computer would be leased to us instead of sold), the manufacturers would have an inherent interest in ensuring the longevity (both in the sense of quality and in the sense of being able to fulfill the given service) of their products, which in turn would reduce the environmental damage.

All this fits in nicely I think with the rush of AJAX-y / Web 2.0-y web applications that we are seeing. Because this liberates us from depending on a given computer / operating system and usually you don’t need a heavy weight machine to use them. This is a step in a “software as service” direction, so it might well be that if you are using Google Reader, you are helping the environment :).

On a more technical note: there are many advantages and disadvantages to these kind of “applications”, many of which have been already discussed years ago during the thin client versus fat client debate. It might well be that this is only a temporary phenomenon made possible by the increase of available bandwidth and that in the future the balance may again shift if the available bandwidth / average application size changes in the opposite direction (which I think is the main reason for choosing one solution over the other)