My favorite Obama quotation is not one of his most poetic: My mother [would] … wake me up at 4:30 in the morning, and we’d sit there and go through my lessons. And I used to complain and grumble. And she’d say, “Well this is no picnic for me either, buster.” He had me at “buster.” I love these words . . .
The Wall Street Journal asks economists: what’s the most economy-conscious way to spend an extra $8 a week? (Earlier) International Oscar winners are good for Hollywood. Nuclear energy is in vogue in Latin America. (Earlier) Can kids get better at math by mimicking Italians?
I took my four children to the movie Coraline this weekend. After the movie, I asked them how they liked it. Their four answers: “great,” “good,” “O.K.,” and “Thank God it is over.” Coming from my kids, who always say the latest movie is their favorite, those are not very positive reviews. I have never been in a movie theater . . .
Doug Mills/The New York Times Our friends at speechwars.com have put together a really fun tool to help you mine their database of the full text of all State of the Union Addresses (even though this wasn’t technically such an address) as well as inaugurals. It’s a fun way of tracking which issues have occupied the minds of our leaders. . . .
While activism is virtually synonymous with “not-for-profit,” a San Francisco startup called Virgance has begun a slew of campaigns that aim to make money off of activism. As reported in The Economist, one campaign is a “green venture fund” on Facebook where users can invest their money (as little as $100), with Virgance getting a portion of the returns. But . . .
Our friend James Altucher, in an interview at Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker, talks about visiting Bernie Madoff and his son Mark back in early 2005 to pitch them his fund of funds: I had a fund of what’s called PIPE [private investment in public equity] hedge funds. And I went through the whole pitch. My returns were great, they were very . . .
We’ve been running a quiz about stereotypical views of transportation and urbanization in Los Angeles. Consider a headline that ran in The New York Times in 2006: “In Land of Freeways, Mass Transit Makes Nary a Dent.” I’ll soon address the issue of Los Angeles transit. In the meantime, did you, like The Times‘s headline writer, guess that Los Angeles . . .
Here’s an interesting concept from blog reader Todd Palmer, who wants reader opinions as to whether his concept can work in the marketplace; and he also needs a good domain name. Todd’s idea: The site would function as a recruiting network, giving students and corporations an entirely new dimension of access to one another. Corporations would post tasks, real or . . .
You submitted your mottoes, more than 300 strong. You voted on the six finalists. So you, dear blog readers, are solely responsible for having chosen the United States’ new six-word motto. The finalists were: 1. Consumption’s the Cure That Ails Us. (Submitted by Quin.) 2. We Will Get It Right, Eventually. (Herb) 3. We Are Too Big to Fail. (Jonathan) . . .
We recently ran our second annual six-word motto contest for the U.S. The six finalists have been chosen and voted upon; we will announce the winner tomorrow. In the meantime, take a listen early tomorrow morning to The Takeaway, where I’ll be discussing the contest. Even better, The Takeaway is planning to interview some of the finalists, so that should . . .
The University of Chicago hospital made headlines this week when it was criticized by the American College of Emergency Physicians for a plan that tries to get non-emergency patients out of its emergency room. I’ve been fortunate to have only made one visit to the University of Chicago emergency room in the five years I’ve lived in Hyde Park. My . . .
A while back, I wrote about the Game Theorist blog, in which my friend Joshua Gans writes about his adventures as an economist-parent (or equally, as a parent-economist). Each role seems to teach him something about the other, and his passion for both is infectious. He has collected much of this material in his new book Parentonomics, which has recently . . .
A related set of lawsuits involving billions of dollars has provided employment opportunities for a number of consulting economists specializing in antitrust issues or labor economics issues. I’ve been involved in three of the cases, and they have been great fun (and a good way of paying dental bills). I was crestfallen to find out that I am not likely . . .
I blogged a while back about the remarkable documentary film Smile Pinki that follows two young children as they have cleft surgery. One of those children is named Pinki. Last night Smile Pinki won an Academy Award. Pinki was there, having flown in from India.
Reputations are powerful, vulnerable, fragile things. Sometimes they shift overnight (think Bernie Madoff); often they are decades in the making. I’ve always been interested in the reputations of institutions, especially universities, and the degree to which relatively small events loom very large in long-term reputation. Latest example: George Mason University is, in the public mind (or at least my mind), . . .
Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig has spent much of his career focused on technology and the law, and how the two affect copyright. He represented internet publisher Eric Eldred in Eldred v. Ashcroft, wherein Eldred and others challenged the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended terms of copyright protection in the United States by 20 years. Eldred lost the case.
Since the recession was made official, and even before, magazine covers brought out a host of recession-related imagery: downward-slanting arrows, roller coasters, and even (groan) the passé bear or bull. Back in October, Vanessa Voltolina, writing for Folio magazine’s blog, asked BusinessWeek‘s art director Andrew Horton what makes a good or bad recession cover. “There are a slew of recession . . .
Dear Mr. Geithner, I have been on jury duty recently. Nevertheless, I have been observing your first few weeks in office. I figured you could use a little help. I, personally, don’t have the expertise, so I thought I’d lean on a few acquaintances who have weathered several economic storms. What’s that? You say you have your own friends? Well . . .
There are at least four ways of meeting a decline in labor demand: laying off workers, cutting nominal annual salaries, cutting hires, or reducing hours. It is difficult to lay off tenured faculty; but in this recession, universities are using two other methods of cutting payroll. Some schools have imposed faculty hiring freezes. Others are furloughing faculty: Arizona State, for . . .
If you’ve visited the home page of Amazon.com anytime in the past several months, it’s hard not to notice its big house ad for the Kindle (and now the Kindle 2). And I don’t blame them. Amazon is an amazing company that could probably sell just about anything. (As a writer, I am grateful they started out with books.) With . . .
Five weeks ago, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Dozens responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a couple per week. Authors Uncovered Here are more quote authors Shapiro’s tracked down recently. . . .
Now that A-Rod has delivered the annual Yankees Substance Abuse Lecture to kick off spring training, I think we’re all ready for some actual baseball. Micah Kelber is a writer and freelance rabbi who lives in Brooklyn, currently writing a screenplay about divorce in New York in the 1940’s. He has written a terrifically entertaining guest post on the oft-neglected . . .
Do you shop at Trader Joe’s? From what I have seen, the world is divided into three sets of people. 1. Those who have never been to a Trader Joe’s, and perhaps have never heard of it. 2. Those who love Trader Joe’s more than they love their own families. 3. Those who love Trader Joe’s more than they love . . .
The marketing hook for the suddenly-everywhere Snuggie is that its form-fitting coziness helps you keep down your home-heating bills. (O.K., that’s only one hook: the ads also claim that ordinary blankets are too cumbersome and may, tragically, entrap your hands.)
Despite charges that it simply wants to grab web traffic, Time.com has bravely gone ahead with its second annual list of the Top 25 blogs on the web. And guess who made the list? Yep. For the second straight year. We’d like to thank the Academy … Seriously, we are flattered and thankful. Thanks especially to our excellent contributors and . . .
The notion of micropayments — a pay-per-click/download web model — is hardly a new one. But as a business model it hasn’t exactly caught fire, or even generated more than an occasional spark. Lately, however, the journalism community has become obsessed with the idea. This is what happens when an existing business model begins to collapse: alternative models are desperately . . .
Thanks to The Times‘s nice writeup (“Dieting? Put Your Money Where Your Fat Is”), an Internet company that I helped found, www.stickK.com, has been getting a spike in commitment contracts. As readers of this blog know, stickK (shameless plug) is a commitment store that helps you stick to your goals. We’ll elicit support from your friends. We’ll nag you if . . .
Whatever we end up calling this recession/depression, I think we can safely name one small part of it: The Great Giveback. There seems to be a rebate fever among firms trying hard to keep their customers happy, or keep their customers at all. JetBlue just announced it will give full ticket refunds to customers who lose their jobs. A few . . .
One effect of President Obama‘s $500,000 salary cap on the executives of bailed out firms (if it has any effect at all; Gary Becker thinks it won’t) could be an exodus of human capital from the top echelons of the finance industry. A new paper suggests that talented people are likely to leave finance in droves anyway, once tighter regulations . . .
Thirty percent of U.S. electricity consumption could be erased through gains in energy productivity, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute. (Related: see R.M.I. chairman Amory Lovins‘s recent guest post.) The institute’s analysis arrived at electricity productivity stats for all 50 states by dividing each state’s G.D.P. by the kilowatt hours of electricity it consumed. New York state topped its list. . . .