johaneriksson.se

• The Sandpit, described as “A day in the life of New York City as seen in miniature”. The video was made using 35 000 still shots, cut together and with effects added to create the miniature look. Well worth watching whenever you have five minutes to fill. You can read an interview with the creator here.
• Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal. Jonathan I. Schwartz, former President and CEO of Sun Microsystems has started blogging about things he couldn’t talk about while working for Sun. In this post he talks about the time and effort spent dealing with intellectual property suits. As someone who feels that it is reasonable to protect the distribution rights of intellectual property creators and holders, it’s important to note the costs of a poorly defined system for doing so. There is a huge amount of resources spent in the courts, that could otherwise be used in a productive manner.

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Andra intressanta bloggar om: foto, new york, upphovsrätt

Apparently, if you’re willing to give up five U.S. dollars you can have someone do anything from turning your pictures into polaroids to writing love letters to your significant other. Specialization taken to the extreme?

I wonder what people who worry (worried?) about all of our jobs being outsourced feel about this.

Overall, the concept is not entirely crazy, but the fixed five dollar price seems to make most offers somewhat silly.

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HT: Lifehacker
Andra intressanta bloggar om: ekonomi, internet

I’d like to recommend this talk, by Robin Hansson on hyper growth and the future. I honestly couldn’t say whether I find his story plausible or not, but it’s certainly thought provoking and worth listening to.

Robin Hanson: “Economics of Nanotech and AI” at Foresight 2010 Conference from Foresight Institute on Vimeo.

I also found this talk on self-taught primary education in rural India rather interesting.

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HT: Arnold Kling, Abi Raja
Andra intressanta bloggar om: ekonomi, tillväxt, framtiden, utbildning, indien

As you’ve noticed, my blogging has suffered a substantial frequency drop over the last few days. I assure you that the drop is temporary, and entirely caused by the Olympic Games. For a sports junkie like me, these are exciting days. I’ve obviously enjoyed the Swedish victories, won by Charlotte Kalla and Björn Ferry.

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Since I consider hockey to be the sport of sports, the main event began yesterday. If you understand Swedish, Per Bjurman’s blog is indispensable.

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One thing I like about the Olympics, is the opportunity to watch sports I otherwise would never watch. So far, two events have been pleasant surprises for me.

• Snowboard Cross. It’s action-packed, and the races are often close enough to be exciting until the end.
• Nordic Combined. The elegance of ski jumping mixes well with the fighting spirit of cross country skiing.

Is there anything you’ve particularly enjoyed?

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In spite of having most of my blogging time consumed by the telly, I’ll try to keep the blog alive.

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Andra intressanta bloggar om: os, sport

It’s not uncommon for people with a different set of political beliefs than mine, to claim that income inequality causes a number of social ills. While no policy goals follow from that being so, it’s an important question well worth asking. Recently, a book called The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, has been getting some attention. It argues that income inequality leads to physical and mental health problems, drug abuse, crime and an array of other problems.

If correct, the book would provide a strong argument in favour of social democratic redistribution policies. However, it appears to suffer from the rather common problem of mistaking correlation for causality. Tino Sanandaji explains:

From a theoretical perspective, social problems cause inequality, or are often both caused by deeper ills. In fact it is difficult to think about a social problem that does not cause inequality! Low level of human capital makes your more likely to not take care of your health and causes low income. Bad norms cause crime and low income. Drug use causes problems and low income. Family disruptions causes social problems and low income. And so on.

If The Spirit Level wants to make extraordinary claims (middle class people become more likely to die if the rich grow richer) they need extraordinary evidence.

Finding causality is not an easy job. One has to be careful.

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Andra intressanta bloggar om: politik, jämlikhet, inkomst

• Steven Strogatz, professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University, has created a blog. He’ll write about “the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective“. Could be good.
• Arnold Kling daydreams about federalism. There are plenty of interesting ideas. Perhaps I’ll return to it.
• Happiness map, via Eric Barker.
• Garry Kasparov on computers in chess.

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Andra intressanta bloggar om: politik, matematik, federalism, lycka, schack

Publishers have been displeased with the pricing on Amazon Kindle since the beginning. They’ve wanted higher prices on newly released books, in order to protect hardback sales. Along comes Apple’s iPad, challenging Amazon’s de facto monopoly, and the publishers have taken their chance. The result of this new competition appears to be higher consumer prices, rather than lower — an odd outcome.

Megan McArdle has written a good post on the topic.

But Kindle’s strategy was on the “benevolent monopolist” side:  Amazon wanted to attain a virtual monopoly over the eBook market by using its bargaining power to keep the prices of eBooks low.  Once Steve Jobs showed that he was willing to give publishers better terms, that bargaining power was eroded.

Does that mean consumers are worse off?  Maybe.  As someone who likes to consume cheap electronic reading material, I’m tempted to say yes.  But the publishers would say that if consumers like new books, they need profit margins high enough to feed the queue.

She also points out that monopolies are not always as bad as they are thought to be. Sometimes, what matters is the threat of competition. With no law to enforce their monopoly, and with a product that is relatively cheap to start producing, the mere possibility of other companies entering the market forced Amazon to keep their prices down. At the same time, their market dominance gave them a lot of sway over the publishers. The emergence of the iPad does not, in itself, remove the incentive for low prices. What it does is to take away Amazon’s influence over publishers. Whether the end result is good or bad for consumers is difficult to predict.

My guess is that while eBooks become more expensive, the devices on which to read them will be cheaper.

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Andra intressanta bloggar om: teknik, ekonomi, kindle, ipad

Not only is President Obama working hard at health care for all, cutting deficits, fighting in Afghanistan and combating unemployment. He is also works part time as a basketball commentator, and takes on the unfairness of the U.S. college football system. What a guy!

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Andra intressanta bloggar om: politik, obama, usa

Here’s an inventive take on one of the old debates in macro economics. It was created by John Papola and Russ Roberts:

Good stuff. Here are Tyler Cowen’s appreciative comments.

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Andra intressanta bloggar om: politik, ekonomi, hayek, keynes

I’ve noticed that posting a comment to this blog sometimes leads to an error page. I apologize for that. I believe I’ve fixed the problem (again). It seems like upgrading the blogging software reintroduces the error, but now that I know what causes it I’ll try to stay on top of it. If it shows up again, please let me know.