Townhall.com::Holding the Key to Gas Prices::By George Will
Hat tip: Carpe Diem
Division of Labour: Drip: Matthew Sweet
I just added Matthew Sweet’s album “100% Fun” to my iPod. When I worked at Camelot Music in high school, this was one of my favorite albums to put on in-store play. This illustrates a couple of interesting complications associated with measuring changes in standards of living over time.
I just bought it for $9.99. Adjusted for inflation, the Camelot “Hot Sheet” price of $12.88 in 1995 would have been $17.52 in 2007. The real price of the music has fallen by about 43% in thirteen years.
It’s tempting to quote the entire thing, since it’s only about two paragraphs more, but click through and read it.
Meanwhile, I just went to Napster and after two clicks I’m listening to “100% Fun” for the first time, paying nothing above the monthly fee.
Update: BTW, it wasn’t that interesting. Nothing on it grabbed my like “Girlfriend”, so I’m glad I didn’t spend any money to give it a try. But I am glad that I gave it a try.
Growthology: The Puzzling Supply-Side of Skills
This was a comment that I left:
Grant McCracken observes
Wikipedia says,
JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) is a United States-based online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions.
JSTOR was originally funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, but is now an independent, self-sustaining, not-for-profit organization with offices in New York City and Ann Arbor, Michigan.
But I say, this stuff is bought and paid for. It is time to release it into the public domain. Surely, there is a university server somewhere that would assume the costs. Google, I am quite sure, would be willing to shoulder the burden.
I agree. JSTOR’s use of its position as a gatekeeper in order to fund maintaining its position as a gatekeeper is only justifiable if there’s no other way to make this information available; like McCracken I suspect that there are alternatives. If there ever was information that “wanted to be free” it’s academic work that’s already been bought and paid for, quite often by public money at that.
This is primarily a test of posting to the new blog…
Charity: Aid workers raping, abusing children - CNN.com
The most horrible thing is that there’s absolutely nothing shocking about this to anybody who’s been following the news through the blogosphere about the UN and NGOs.
TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook
TiddlyWiki is a neat little single-file, stand-alone wiki. That’s right, it’s nothing more than an HTML page with a bunch of javascript and css that lets it self-update as a wiki. Download it to your desktop, store it on a thumb-drive, carry one wherever you go. You don’t need anything more than a browser to use it. Make as many as you like just by copying the page. Very nifty for taking notes on various little projects.
Neat web page that lets you compare pictures of various styles of swords, to scale (I’m presuming reproductions).
The real harm Hillary Clinton inflicted on Bosnia. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine
I can remember, second, a meeting with Clinton’s then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin at the British Embassy. When I challenged him on the sellout of the Bosnians, he drew me aside and told me that he had asked the White House for permission to land his own plane at Sarajevo airport, if only as a gesture of reassurance that the United States had not forgotten its commitments. The response from the happy couple was unambiguous: He was to do no such thing, lest it distract attention from the first lady’s health care “initiative.”
Not that I’m planning to make this a regular feature, but, I just can’t let this pass without comment. The sheer Clintonian gall to cite her Bosnia adventure as evidence of her foreign policy experience and fitness for office….
Well, if Bryan Caplan is right that college educations mostly serve as a signaling function, then it’s not a return on education itself but a return on being the kind of person who can stick out a tedious multi-year task for a distant future reward. That is, college graduation is just a hard-to-fake demonstration to future employers that you’re the kind of person who can provide value in their workplace. If you manage to figure out a way that even lazy, flaky people who can’t force themselves to attend a few hours a week of classes or turn in any written assignment on time in a semi-readable form can get through college and get a degree indistinguishable from anybody else’s you might well find that the returns drop as employers stop valuing the certificate. My guess is that employers would try to find ways of distinguishing among the degrees, and you’d start worrying about the education premium gap between more and less highly ranked colleges or majors.
I’d be curious, though, as to what the statistics are if you distinguish between skilled-but-non-college-credentialed labor (such as plumbers or auto mechanics) and unskilled labor.