Favourite Web Tools to start 2009 with
I’m going to be a little unoriginal and echo Michael Arrington with this post here, where I generate a list of my main web tools for 2009. My list is actually a lot shorter than his—for one, I’m not that “social” and also still seem to be hooked on working through desktop apps on my [...]

Fly By Night
We're back in Lexington; I'm still recovering from bronchitis and have to start back teaching this evening.We spent the Sunday morning before Christmas visiting at NE Houston Baptist just down the street from my in-laws house. Like Pastor Dave at...

Media on Media: ForeignPolicy.com under WaPo; Hatchet on HuffPo

The winter holidays are over, sadly, though even more sadly things look a lot bleaker going into the new year, including media, and, media about media. Two such stories:

—ForeignPolicy.com Makeover: Under the new ownership of WaPo, here's what you can do if you're not part of the print+online bureaucracy: you can completely relaunch a magazine website into a daily news affair, in less than five weeks. The site/mag is under the Slate Media Group, and now the reasons for this separate group are a lot more apparent than when it was announced last year: a run around the crazy state of red tape at the main paper. As Susan Glasser, executive editor of Foreign Policy points out in this Politico story:"We were able to do this guerilla redesign in just five of six weeks…That's really hard to do in a big place that has multiple layers of people involved and two different corporate entities."

—Dumenco's Hatchet Job on HuffPo: Our regular readers know that we have been sufficiently bearish on HuffPo over the years, and even when crazy valuations were being bandied about by, well, HuffPo insiders to the media, there were enough skeptics (including us) of those numbers. Simon Dumenco, whose AdAge columns have been on the mark more often than not over the years, does a horrible hatchet job, taking a series of half-truths, completely false claims from dubious sources, and zero understanding of valuations of private vs public companies, or for that matter media companies, and comes to the grand conclusion that the site is worth only about $2 million. If I wasn't miserably sick and cold in the north Indian winter this week, it would require almost the same fisking as the 2006 Digg BusinessWeek cover story that he helpfully points out. Yes, almost all is fair as humor, Simon, we get it, but this from a former Inside.com colleague…c'mon. One call to the usually-almost-useless HuffPo PR may have cleared half of these numbers up…

Comment on How Marbles Are Made by Anonymous
WOW 6 layers for a custom marble... thats so freaking crazy... so much work is put into just being able to make a custom one.

No second chance

Most economists believe that we are not in any imminent danger of societal collapse. We have plenty of resources and the big problem of global warming can be solved by taxing or otherwise restricting the use of carbon-based fuels. New technologies will give us what we need, in time and affordably. It has always been thus. (Except when it hasn't. But one would have to know the history of civilizations that did succumb to resource degradation and scarcity, and most economists are very much concerned with the utterly now.)

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GATES MEND RISK is an anagram for MARKET DESIGNS
Markets have rules, and some rules work better than others.

Selection Bias in Blogging, by David Henderson

Over at marginalrevolution.com, Tyler Cowen posted a particularly good entry on famous economists' famous errors. The average quality of comments on that site is usually higher than on most economics sites, due, in no small part to Tyler's and Alex's fairmindedness and perpetual introduction of interesting issues. But this time I thought the average quality of comments was even higher than usual.

I thought I would add a comment on one of the most famous and widely-cited articles on health economics, the 1963 classic by Kenneth Arrow, "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care." I seemed to remember a whopper in there about how when you have imperfect information, you necessarily need some kind of government regulation. So I reread the whole article this morning and guess what? I couldn't find the whopper. Arrow's article was much more nuanced than I had remembered. So I almost decided not to write this post. But then I thought, "Wait a minute. The main purpose of Econlog is to disseminate good economics. So what if I can't find errors in Arrow. Isn't it worthwhile to cite good work also?" I had almost been defeated by selection bias.

His article is well worth reading. In it, you'll see his proofs that if an insurance company has loading fees (costs besides the payout of benefits), the optimal insurance policy will have a deductible and that if an insurance company is risk averse, it will have some degree of co-insurance in its insurance policies. He also has a beautiful treatment of moral hazard in health insurance, not just in the narrow sense of the incentive not to take care of oneself but also in the wider sense of overspending on medical care.

Arrow also points out that optimality in health insurance requires that higher-risk people be charged higher premiums.

And throughout he writes beautifully.

Arrow also takes seriously Milton Friedman's proposal, made in his 1962 classic, Capitalism and Freedom, for certification of doctors rather than licensing. Strangely, Arrow doesn't mention Friedman in this context although he does mention Friedman's colleague, Reuben Kessel, who also opposed licensing.

Selection Bias in Blogging, by David Henderson

Over at marginalrevolution.com, Tyler Cowen posted a particularly good entry on famous economists' famous errors. The average quality of comments on that site is usually higher than on most economics sites, due, in no small part to Tyler's and Alex's fairmindedness and perpetual introduction of interesting issues. But this time I thought the average quality of comments was even higher than usual.

I thought I would add a comment on one of the most famous and widely-cited articles on health economics, the 1963 classic by Kenneth Arrow, "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care." I seemed to remember a whopper in there about how when you have imperfect information, you necessarily need some kind of government regulation. So I reread the whole article this morning and guess what? I couldn't find the whopper. Arrow's article was much more nuanced than I had remembered. So I almost decided not to write this post. But then I thought, "Wait a minute. The main purpose of Econlog is to disseminate good economics. So what if I can't find errors in Arrow. Isn't it worthwhile to cite good work also?" I had almost been defeated by selection bias.

His article is well worth reading. In it, you'll see his proofs that if an insurance company has loading fees (costs besides the payout of benefits), the optimal insurance policy will have a deductible and that if an insurance company is risk averse, it will have some degree of co-insurance in its insurance policies. He also has a beautiful treatment of moral hazard in health insurance, not just in the narrow sense of the incentive not to take care of oneself but also in the wider sense of overspending on medical care.

Arrow also points out that optimality in health insurance requires that higher-risk people be charged higher premiums.

And throughout he writes beautifully.

Arrow also takes seriously Milton Friedman's proposal, made in his 1962 classic, Capitalism and Freedom, for certification of doctors rather than licensing. Strangely, Arrow doesn't mention Friedman in this context although he does mention Friedman's colleague, Reuben Kessel, who also opposed licensing.

Rumors of Software Engineering’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated
Rumors of Software Engineering’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated by Steve McConnell Indeed, one of the hallmarks of engineering as opposed to science is that engineers will work with materials whose properties are not entirely understood, and they’ll factor in safety margins until the science comes along later and allows more precision in the engineer’s use of [...]

Rumors of Software Engineering’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated
Rumors of Software Engineering’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated by Steve McConnell Indeed, one of the hallmarks of engineering as opposed to science is that engineers will work with materials whose properties are not entirely understood, and they’ll factor in safety margins until the science comes along later and allows more precision in the engineer’s use of [...]