We’ve told you about recession music, recession comfort, and depression cooking. Now: recession gadgetry? Last Year’s Model is a site encouraging users to reject disposable culture by hanging on to their good old gadgets as long as possible. It’s good for the pocketbook and good for the environment. We’ve got a 2004 model-year iPod whirring around the Freakonomics office. Is . . .
In recent months, we’ve posted a few examples of music written about the current recession. Now it’s time to see just how sharp you are with a pop-music quiz. This song is called “The Final Day”: Click Below to Listen Caution: it is very loud. The lyrics are nowhere near as straightforward as, say, “Hey Paul Krugman.” It might be . . .
A 60 Minutes segment on Sunday presented sad stories about people in their 50’s and early 60’s who had counted on their 401K plans to provide a comfortable retirement income by age 65 or even earlier, but who have had their dreams destroyed by the stock market bust. Anyone born in the 1940’s or 1950’s who planned on retiring by . . .
Please welcome to our corps of in-house bloggers Dwyer Gunn, a young writer who has studied economics at Wellesley, worked in finance, and been a research assistant at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory. “The biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression,” as described by Richard Posner, began in December of 2007 amidst plunging housing prices and reached its . . .
There’s an interesting discussion over at Room for Debate on how the recession is affecting family life. A key question is whether recessions lead to a rise in divorce or not.
Here’s Betsey Stevenson (my frequent coauthor and significant other):
I have to admit, the transportation portion of the stimulus package troubles me. It’s not that I have a bad opinion of it; what troubles me is that I have considerable difficulty forming an opinion at all. The process is so hasty, and involves so many different players, and will fund such a vast number of projects, and has so . . .
A thoughtful piece in the Washington Post on Ben Bernanke is extremely laudatory about his new approach at the Fed. I still worry that in the end that the government will have spent trillions too much to fight a recession and that economic growth will suffer for decades. There is a real principal-agent problem at work here. If the government . . .
So much of the casual conversation I hear about the direction of the economy is downright confused — not only because the economy is legitimately confusing, but because people don’t know what metrics to keep their eye on, and especially because they jumble their leading and lagging indicators. This Associated Press article on the state of the stock market reminds . . .
Newspaper headlines earlier this week reported a dramatic 19 percent decline in housing prices based on the Case-Shiller index of real-estate prices. Stan Humphries, writing on the Zillow blog, notes that Zillow’s price index didn’t fall as much as Case-Shiller. The difference is that Zillow’s index does not include foreclosures, but Case-Shiller does. Humphries notes that a staggering percentage of . . .
| Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman gave a fascinating talk at the Japan Society recently, on the nature of the financial crisis, the importance of financial regulations, and how the internet and the 24-hour news cycle complicate the recovery. You can watch the talk here. [%comments]
Matt Miller It isn’t hard to think of ideas that were once considered conventional wisdom — “Women shouldn’t vote,” “People should be segregated by race” — but were eventually laid to rest. In his book The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash A New Prosperity, Matt Miller writes that the country’s biggest . . .
Are such products too weird to take hold in the U.S.? Remember that the Walkman, the great cassette-tape ancestor of portable CD players and iPods, also started out as one of those wacky Japanese inventions.
The economics meme of the day appears to be naming the current downturn. A while back, our friends at Economix solicited reader suggestions, of which my favorite was “The Great Deception.”
As noted here earlier, this recession (depression? repression?) is inspiring some pretty decent pop music. I think the apex has been reached. Listen for yourself to “Hey, Paul Krugman,” by Jonathan Mann: It’s a pretty great song, and not just because of the lyrics:
Blog reader Dan Ciruli emailed us this photo from a California cemetery as another candidate for a recession magazine cover: Dan Ciruli It may be prematurely optimistic, but after last week, should it look more like this? If you have a Freak-worthy photo of your own, send it along here.
I asked my ophthalmologist on Friday how his business was doing in the recession, and he said it was stable. He noted, however, that his colleagues who specialize in Lasik surgery had seen a 60 percent drop in business. Clearly, Lasik, which is not reimbursed by most insurance plans, is postponable in times when incomes drop; at least in the . . .
| When the owner of a translation agency asked his international acquaintances how the recession is treating them. In Latvia, there was sarcasm: “Everything’s just peachy. The government resigned last week. … Prices rise so fast you can actually see the difference from one month to another. I miss living in the U.S.” In Russia, there was bitterness: “I see . . .
| Citing tough times, Haagen-Dazs claims it was forced to downsize its ice cream pints: they will now be 14 ounces instead of 16. But to rival Ben and Jerry’s, a recession (or even depression) is no excuse for less ice cream. The company responded to the news by reassuring its customers: “Now more than ever, you deserve your full . . .
From recession-culture trends we’ve written about on this blog lately, a recession icon of sorts emerges, wrapped in a Snuggie, puffing on a pipe — and now with a copy of Ayn Rand‘s Atlas Shrugged on his lap. The Economist reports that the book’s sales rank on Amazon is far above what it’s been in previous years (and briefly topped . . .
The total number of hate groups operating in the U.S. has increased by more than half since 2000, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.). Photo: upload The report, and subsequent news coverage of it, blames this distressing trend on the deteriorating economy and the election of Barack Obama. But economic downturns don’t necessarily stoke . . .
A seatmate on a flight I took described her interesting business to me. She organizes seminars where she speaks to groups of professionals in her field.
She rents a meeting room in a hotel (her fixed cost) and incurs the variable costs of her time and travel. I asked her about her business during the recession, since I assume that the demand for her seminars has decreased. Doesn’t she have a lot of empty seats? Isn’t she losing money?
If cigars were the big-money culture item of the booming 1990’s, and ever-larger SUVs and McMansions were the status symbols of the mid-2000’s, maybe it makes sense that we’re wrapping ourselves in Snuggies as the recession sets in.
There’s been much talk about how philanthropies may be one of the greatest casualties of the recession. (Considering their various inefficiencies, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.) It’s hardly just the foundations who were invested with Bernie Madoff; donors simply have fewer discretionary dollars. (And, long-term, the picture may get bleaker if President Obama downsizes the charity . . .
Dartmouth’s Eric Zitzewitz is one of my favorite co-authors, and a whiz at tracking financial markets. And when he mentioned to me last week that a close look at the options markets told an interesting tale of fear, I asked him to share his observations. Here goes. Quantifying the Nightmare Scenarios By Eric Zitzewitz A Guest Post There’s no shortage . . .
When President Obama told Congress this week that his stimulus package wasn’t about helping banks but about helping people, he could have been talking about a former sound designer in Hollywood named Bob. Bob is bankrupt. He went bust in September, and this month he began a blog chronicling his own economic recovery. The U.S. might be too big to . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
Denis Defreyne It’s interesting to see how people’s spending patterns respond to a (presumably) temporary decline in income during the recession. Which items are more or less income-elastic in the short run? A pediatrician friend of ours mentions that he is seeing less business; when there are three kids with coughs, for example, a parent will bring in one, get . . .
As evidenced by this chart from the betting site Intrade, the probability of Slumdog Millionaire winning the Oscar for Best Picture has risen over the past two months right along with the probability that 2009 will be a year of recession (i.e., two negative quarters of G.D.P.): This correlation isn’t meaningful in any way. Lots of things rise (or fall) . . .