Economics

The Role of the ABC

Core Econ - September 3, 2010 - 11:15am

Stephen managed to rattle some feathers over his piece the other week that the case for the ABC may no longer exist in the Internet age. He argued (i) that the ABC, being subsidised, provides unfair competition for others; (ii) that good reporting is a public good but is now amply and independently supplied by the Internet; and (iii) that diversity is important and the ABC’s role in providing that is no longer essential. Read more »

What does HDR mean for photos?

Core Econ - September 3, 2010 - 12:34am

Apple announced yesterday that it would be building HDR processing into its iPhone camera. There is already an app for that and the two pictures here that I took the other day show you what it means for pictures.

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Climate Villain Bjørn Lomborg Does U-Turn, Says Global Warming is a $100 Billion Problem

Popular Science - September 2, 2010 - 5:00am
Bjorn Lomborg Lomborg.com

Apparently, some tigers can change their stripes -- especially if they have books to sell. One of our favorite climate villains, the Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg, has apparently warmed to the idea of climate change, and now says it's a problem on which the world ought to spend $100 billion annually.

Lomborg's forthcoming book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change, declares that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today." He examines eight methods to reduce or stop it, including wave, wind, solar and nuclear power, as well as geoengineering, and advocates a carbon emissions tax to finance investment. Read more »

Newspapers, aggregators and the ABC

Core Econ - August 29, 2010 - 11:01pm

I wrote an Op Ed for the AFR a few weeks back that has sparked some debate. Rather than attempting to debate by e-mail, I reproduce the Op Ed below and hope that the debate can continue through this blog.Our newspapers are in a fight to the death. One enemy is well known – the news aggregators like Google News. But the other enemy has slipped under the radar – the public broadcasters like the ABC.

News aggregators upset the newspapers because they lower consumer search costs and reduce barriers to entry.

Want to know the days top stories? Go to your aggregator’s page on the internet and you get the headlines from a vast array of alternative sources. Don’t want to pay? Of the hundreds of stories on any topic, a few will be behind pay-walls. But these are easy to avoid as there are a myriad of substitutes that you can click on instead. Read more »

Efficiency

Harry Clarke - August 29, 2010 - 4:16pm

From Greg Mankiw I got this interesting piece by Uwe Reinhardt critiquing the economic idea of efficiency – it’s a sequel to an earlier argument by Reinhardt. It interests me that both articles pop up in the business pages of the NYT.

Roughly efficiency means in a producer setting that more valued output is obtained from given productive inputs. Read more »

Apple misses the TV game again

Core Econ - September 3, 2010 - 1:15am

TV is a mess. It is hard to navigate to what you want to watch without having to deal with a mess of technology and diverse business plans rooted in crappy copyright laws. Everyone knows it and for ages we have waited for someone to cut through it and fix it.

Apple has had ambitions on this for years and has offered a few contributions. First, it put TV and movies on iTunes so you could watch a computer connected to a TV. Second, it put TV and movies on iPads and let you play them on a TV. Third, it developed Apple TV — a glorified iPod — to do the same thing. Each has helped but each suffers from the overall flaws in the system. Read more »

Ping’s big flaw

Core Econ - September 2, 2010 - 10:33pm

Apple introduced a new social network yesterday — Ping. Ping basically allows you to share your iTunes music, video and other interests with you friends. On paper, it is a great idea as it integrates an existing social network into an existing payment and shopping network. This provides a route to monetisation that has eluded many others. Do this for apps and books as well and this might be significant. As I have written before, sharing your electronic tastes is a gap waiting to be filled. Read more »

China’s central bank governor and the USD

Core Econ - August 31, 2010 - 12:44pm

There are at the moment some unconfirmed reports that China’s central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, has defected to the United States. Among the reasons given for his possible defection are large losses made by the central bank on investments in US Treasury Bonds. One can only speculate at this stage, but presumably the next central bank governor would be a lot more reluctant to invest in US assets! Which will make the financing of the US public debt much more challenging, as well as lead to a much weaker USD. A story worth watching! Read more »

Multi-party democracy and ‘reform’

We are all dead - August 29, 2010 - 6:32pm

Michael Stutchbury, Economics Editor of the Australian, dedicated his column in this weekend’s paper to warning of the economic dangers of multi-party democracy. Apparently minority governments mean “policy drift” as opposed to “decisive policy-making”. Stutchbury doubts that a “splintered duopoly” could deliver “the sort of reform agenda business leaders say Australia needs”. Setting aside the question of whether business leaders’ wishes should trump those of the people, it’s worth having a look at Stutchbury’s claim that multi-party government delivers poor economic outcomes. Read more »

Toilet explorations

Core Econ - August 28, 2010 - 11:52pm

As part of my on-going commitment to keep you up to date with the latest urinal and toileting thinking, I have to report today to this Dear Economist quandary posed to Tim Harford:

When I travel I am faced with a difficult choice: which of the toilet booths to use in offices or hotels. I always try to guess which one is the least used.

Harford responds by appealing to the efficient markets hypothesis that suggests that there will be an equilibrium whereby all toilets will on average be equally clean. Of course, this equally suggests that there is nothing special about traveling: toilets will be on average equally clean at your own office too. Note that with a sufficient amount of use this will be true even if there are toilet choosing biases of the form Harford speaks about. After all, it takes a number of rational choosers to balance this out. Read more »