the Pearl Jam effect
An interesting sort of adverse selection, it seems: http://launch.yahoo.com/read/news.asp?contentID=209387 --- Moby recently shared his ideas on record sales, charts, and the role technology has on the industry. Moby's new album, 18, is currently at Number 35 on the Billboard 200 album chart, selling approximately 32,000 copies last week. The album was at Number 15 two weeks ago, and has been decreasing in sales. Moby says 18 is suffering from "Pearl Jam Effect." "I described the 'Pearl Jam Effect' as being a phenomenon wherein bands who have very technically savvy fans will see their records do poorly in the charts, whereas bands/artists who have less technically savvy fans will do quite well on the charts," explained Moby in a recent journal entry on his website. "This is owing to the fact that bands/artists with technically savvy fans will have a lot of fans who will end up downloading music or burning CDs where as less tech-savvy fans will end up buying their CDs." Moby says Weezer is also suffering from the "Pearl Jam Effect." "Weezer sold a lot of records in their first week of release, but since then their sales have dropped off considerably, even thought they have radio hits. Even though they have a very loyal fan base, even though they've made a record their fans really like, even though there's good press coverage on the band and their new CD. I would be very interested to know not how many Weezer CDs have sold, but how many copies of their record are actually in existence." "I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing," he added. "I'm not writing this to voice my opinions. My concern is the way that the industry looks at the success of a musician or of a record that sells or doesn't sell. Popular artists traditionally sold a lot of records. In the future that might not be the case. In fact, even now that might not be the case. Pink outsells Weezer in the States not so much because she's more popular, but because her fans are more likely to buy, as opposed to burn, her CDs." Chirag Kasbekar New Bombay, India
open source
This might interest list members: http://www.researchoninnovation.org/tiip/archive/2002-1c.htm Code, Culture and Cash: The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development ONLINE PAPER First Monday, Volume 6, Number 12 - December 3rd 2001. by David Lancashire --Summary by Karim Lakhani: Context How can a bunch of loosely affiliated volunteer computer hackers take on software industry giants and win? How can they create stable and effective software products without the scaffolding of a firm's bureaucracy and highly paid programmers? The Free/Open Source software (F/OSS) movement is doing just that. The Apache web server software and the GNU/Linux operating system, all initially developed by volunteers, are prime examples of software products that are winning significant market share against established companies like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. In this article, David Lancashire attempts to build a theory, backed by data, to help explain the motivations and peculiar geographic concentration of F/OSS developers. Main Hypothesis and Findings On the face of it, F/OSS development seems to violate standard economic assumptions about individual motivation. Theories generated from within the F/OSS community (e.g., Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar) have focused instead on the uniqueness of hacker culture. But Lancashire downplays these accounts as self-serving. Lancashire studies two well-known, complex F/OSS projects, the Linux operating system kernel and the GNOME graphical-user interface (GUI). He obtains country of origin data on over 430 code contributors to these projects and then ranks the countries based on developers per capita and home internet penetration. In the aggregate, US based developers constitute the majority of developers on both projects. However, when ranked on a per capita basis, the US ranks 10th among 11 countries for the home internet measure and it ranks ninth on developers per capita. Surprisingly, countries like Hungary, Sweden and Denmark rank in the top three based on home internet measures and Sweden, Denmark and Australia are top three based on developers per capita. Lancashire posits an economic model based on opportunity costs to explain these findings. His central claim is that the in the past ten years the locus of F/OSS development appears to have shifted over to Europe. This shift to Europe, from his perspective, is due to the opportunity costs faced by US based software developers-soaring demand and high wages for computer professionals decrease the attractiveness of unpaid activities. On the other hand, European developers not only face lower opportunity costs, but they also benefit by gaining a reputation from participating in open source projects. They can then gain access to higher wage jobs abroad. He sees open source participation as a kind of fixed cost of acquiring reputation. Contributions, Limitations and Extensions Lancashire provides a parsimonious explanation of F/OSS motivations. However, he may oversimplify a complex phenomenon. Some researchers identify other economic considerations, including meeting specific user needs and distributing effort requirements . Sociological studies show that F/OSS participants, rather than having a single motivation like reputation, claim heterogeneous motivations , including learning, having fun, ideology and user need. Lancashire's fixed cost hypothesis, while plausible, would benefit from additional empirical testing and incorporation in a broader theory that includes multiple motivations for participation. See also the discussion at Slashdot. References Kollock, P. (1999). The Economies of Online Cooperation. In P. Kollock M. A. Smith (Eds.), Communities in Cyberspace (pp. 220-239). New York, NY: Routledge. Lakhani, K., Wolf, B. (2002). BCG Open Source Hacker Survey Raymond, Eric. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. von Hippel, E. (2001). Innovation by User Communities: Learning from Open -Source Software. Sloan Management Review, 42(4), 82-86.
Re: Income mobility in the US
An interesting discussion on the issue: http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript306.html It includes (Nobel winner) Jim Heckman of Chicago. Some of the participants do actually question the Dallas FRB's interpretation of the University of Michigan data, which, BTW, you can find here: http://www.isr.umich.edu/src/psid/ A link to the Dallas FRB perspective: http://www.dallasfed.org/htm/pubs/annual/arpt95.html Regards, Chirag - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 5:56 PM Subject: Re: Income mobility in the US The Cox and Alm book is based on studies from the Dallas FED, and they get their data to a large degree the University of Michigan Panel data which has been tracking income mobility. So I think the skeptics will have a hard time dismissing the book as based on weak data, etc. Prof. Peter J. Boettke, Deputy Director James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy Department of Economics, MSN 3G4 George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 Phone: 703-993-1149 FAX: 703-993-1133 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] HomePage: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/pboettke Editor, THE REVIEW OF AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS
Income mobility in the US
Johan Norberg in his In Defence of Global Capitalism claims: Only 5.1 % of the Americans belonging to the poorest one-fifth in 1975 still did so in 1991. In the meantime nearly 30% of them had moved up into the wealthiest one-fifth and altogether 60% had arrived in one of the wealthiest one-fifths. By 1991 the people belonging in 1975 to the poorest fifth had raised their annual income (which at that time was only 1,263 dollars in 1997 prices) by no less than 27,745 dollars, which in absolute figures is more than six times the increase obtained by the wealthiest one-fifth On average, those falling below the poverty line in the USA only stay there for 4.2 months. Only 4% of America's population are long-term poor, i.e. remain poor for over two years. Meanwhile the poorest fifth is replenished with new people - students and immigrants - who then climb up the ladder of wealth. To the last claim he attaches a reference to Michael W. Cox and Richard Alm, Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We're Better Off Than We Think. NY: Basic Books, 1999. My questions: 1. Is it true? Or at least, is this commonly accepted? 2. Does he get all this information from that book? Are there other (commonly accepted) studies that confirm this. People like Krugman seem to dispute anything like this: From: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Economists/favorite_krugman.html Armey cites a study that shows that there is huge income mobility in America. The message here is simple: Don't worry that some people find gold and some don't--next year you may be the winner. He gives numbers saying that fewer than 15 percent of the folks who were in the bottom quintile in 1979 were still there in 1988. He then asserts that it was more likely that someone would move from the bottom quintile to the top than he would stay in place. Again, he doesn't cite the source, but these are familiar numbers. They come from a botched 1992 Bush Administration study, a study that was immediately ridiculed and which its authors would just as soon forget. This is why: The study tracked a number of people who had paid income taxes in each of the years from 1979 to 1988. Since only about half the working population actually paid taxes over the entire period, this meant that the study was already biased towards tracking the relatively successful. And these earners were then compared to the population at large. So the study showed that in 1979, 28 percent of this studied population was in the bottom 20 percent of the whole population; by 1988 that figure was only 7 percent. This means, Armey asserts, that someone in the lowest quintile would be more likely to move to the highest than stay in place. Put kindly, it's a silly argument. For subjects of the study who moved from the bottom to the top, the typical age in 1979 was only 22. This isn't your classic income mobility, Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago remarked at the time. This is the guy who works in the college bookstore and has a real job by the time he is in his early thirties. In reality, moves from the bottom to the top quintile are extremely rare; a typical estimate is that only about 3 percent of families who are in the bottom 20 percent in one year will be in the top 20 percent a decade later. About half will still be in the bottom quintile. And even those 3 percent that move aren't necessarily Horatio Alger stories. The top quintile includes everyone from a $60,000 a year regional manager to Warren Buffett. Regards, Chirag New Bombay, India
Re: Income mobility in the US
BTW, the Norberg quote is from pp. 75-76 of In Defence of Global Capitalism. Timbro, 2001. Chirag - Original Message - From: Chirag Kasbekar [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 5:26 PM Subject: Income mobility in the US Johan Norberg in his In Defence of Global Capitalism claims: Only 5.1 % of the Americans belonging to the poorest one-fifth in 1975 still did so in 1991. In the meantime nearly 30% of them had moved up into the wealthiest one-fifth and altogether 60% had arrived in one of the wealthiest one-fifths. By 1991 the people belonging in 1975 to the poorest fifth had raised their annual income (which at that time was only 1,263 dollars in 1997 prices) by no less than 27,745 dollars, which in absolute figures is more than six times the increase obtained by the wealthiest one-fifth On average, those falling below the poverty line in the USA only stay there for 4.2 months. Only 4% of America's population are long-term poor, i.e. remain poor for over two years. Meanwhile the poorest fifth is replenished with new people - students and immigrants - who then climb up the ladder of wealth. To the last claim he attaches a reference to Michael W. Cox and Richard Alm, Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We're Better Off Than We Think. NY: Basic Books, 1999. My questions: 1. Is it true? Or at least, is this commonly accepted? 2. Does he get all this information from that book? Are there other (commonly accepted) studies that confirm this. People like Krugman seem to dispute anything like this: From: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Economists/favorite_krugman.html Armey cites a study that shows that there is huge income mobility in America. The message here is simple: Don't worry that some people find gold and some don't--next year you may be the winner. He gives numbers saying that fewer than 15 percent of the folks who were in the bottom quintile in 1979 were still there in 1988. He then asserts that it was more likely that someone would move from the bottom quintile to the top than he would stay in place. Again, he doesn't cite the source, but these are familiar numbers. They come from a botched 1992 Bush Administration study, a study that was immediately ridiculed and which its authors would just as soon forget. This is why: The study tracked a number of people who had paid income taxes in each of the years from 1979 to 1988. Since only about half the working population actually paid taxes over the entire period, this meant that the study was already biased towards tracking the relatively successful. And these earners were then compared to the population at large. So the study showed that in 1979, 28 percent of this studied population was in the bottom 20 percent of the whole population; by 1988 that figure was only 7 percent. This means, Armey asserts, that someone in the lowest quintile would be more likely to move to the highest than stay in place. Put kindly, it's a silly argument. For subjects of the study who moved from the bottom to the top, the typical age in 1979 was only 22. This isn't your classic income mobility, Kevin Murphy of the University of Chicago remarked at the time. This is the guy who works in the college bookstore and has a real job by the time he is in his early thirties. In reality, moves from the bottom to the top quintile are extremely rare; a typical estimate is that only about 3 percent of families who are in the bottom 20 percent in one year will be in the top 20 percent a decade later. About half will still be in the bottom quintile. And even those 3 percent that move aren't necessarily Horatio Alger stories. The top quintile includes everyone from a $60,000 a year regional manager to Warren Buffett. Regards, Chirag New Bombay, India
Re: Campaign finance changes
I hope Fred wouldn't mind me also pointing to another (more substantial) interesting piece by him: -- Fred Foldvary, The Completely Decentralized City: The Case for Benefits Based Public Finance, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 60 No. 1 Pg. 403, 01/01/2001 ABSTRACT. An alternative to centralized top-down city governance is a multi-level bottom-up structure based on small neighborhood contractual communities. This paper analyzes the voting rules and public finances of decentralized, contractual urban governance and the likely outcome of such a constitutional structure, substantially reduced transfer seeking or rent seeking. -- At least at first glance, Fred's interesting proposals actually are surprisingly like those proposed by Gus diZerega in his very thought provoking (and, IMO, very Hayekian) book: Persuasion, Power and Polity: A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000. He makes a persuasive case for a contractual federalism of citizens' cooperatives. As he pointed out during the recently concluded Hayek-L seminar on the book, the book was published almost twenty years after it was ready for publishing -- as a 1983 Berkeley Phd. But I would highly recommend it to anybody who's interested in instituting relatively non-coercive democratic institutions and a non-coervice society in general. Chirag Kasbekar The Information Comany Pvt. Ltd. New Bombay, India The real problem is not how to get money out of politics but how to get politics out of money. Alex For my analysis of how to do this, see Recalculating Consent at: http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/fest/files/foldvary.htm Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Gandhi Game
"An eye for an eye and the whole world is blind" -Gandhi It strikes me that Gandhi was not a very good game theorist. Gandhi was a very good game theorist. Analysing only one statement is not enough to conclude that he was a bad game theorist. Wonder what you think of this: The Gandhi Game:http://www.spectacle.org/995/gandhi.htmlfrom: The Ethical Spectacle:http://www.spectacle.org/995/index.htmlChirag Kasbekar The Information Company To those who feel that their values are the values, the less controlled systems necessarily present a spectacle of "chaos," simply because such systems respond to a diversity of values. The more successfully such systems respond to diversity, the more "chaos" there will be, by definition, according to the standards of any specific set of values- other than diversity or freedom as values. Looked at another way, the more self-righteous observers there are, the more chaos (and "waste") will be seen. - Thomas Sowell Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. Click Here
Fwd: [HAYEK-L:] H-SEMINAR: D Laidler Hayek-L Seminar - Fabricating theKeynesianRevolution
List members might be interested in an email seminar by David Laidler on Hayek-L. Chirag Kasbekar MA (Economics), University of Mumbai (Bombay) Here are the details: - Forwarded Message - DATE: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 12:10:41 From: List Host [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hayek-L On-line Seminar -- Announcement David Laidler on _Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution_ Nov. 20 - Nov. 29, 2000 David Laidler will be hosting a seminar on his recent book _The Fabrication of the Keynesian Revolution_ between Nov. 20 and Nov. 29 on the Hayek-L email list, on the web at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/hayek-l.html Those who wish to participate in the seminar may subscribe to the Hayek-L email list via the Hayek-L web site, or by sending the message: subscribe Hayek-L yourfirstname yourlastname to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Laider's online seminar will begin Monday Nov. 20 with an informal introduction to the contents arguments of his book _Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution: Studies of the Inter-war Literature on Money, the Cycle, and Unemployment. David will then field questions reply to comments on the contents of his book thru the next week and a half on the Hayek-L email list, concluding Wednesday, Nov. 29. Laider's book may be purchased from the Cambridge University Press on the web at: http://uk.cambridge.org/economics/catalogue/052164173X/default.htm Chapter Contents Introduction: 1. An overview Part I. The Wicksellians: 2. Wicksellian origins 3. The macrodynamics of the Stockholm school Part II. The Marshallian Tradition in Britain: 4. Cambridge cycle theory: Lavington, Pigou and Robertson 5. The monetary element in the Cambridge tradition 6. The Treatise on Money and related contributions 7. British discussions of unemployment Part III. American Analysis of Money and the Cycle: 8. American macroeconomics between World War I and the Depression 9. American macroeconomics in the early 1930s Part IV. Keynes, the Classical and IS-LM: 10. The General Theory 11. The classics and Mr. Keynes 12. IS-LM and the General Theory 13. Selective synthesis; References. David Laidler is Professor of Economics at the University of Western Ontario. Laidler is the author of a number of books in the theory history of monetary economics, including _The Demand for Money_, _Taking Money Seriously_, and _The Golden Age of the Quantity Theory_. His email address is: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Information on the Hayek-L email list, along with information on past Hayek-L seminars can be found at the Hayek-L email list home page, on the web at: http://www.hayekcenter.org/hayek-l/hayek-l.html The Hayek-L Home Page will also be including a link to the Amazon (US) web bookstore page on Laider's _Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution_. Another link to the book and links to the Hayek-L HOme Page can be found on The Friedrich Hayek Scholars Page, on the web at: http://www.hayekcenter.org/friedrichhayek/hayek.html If you have any questions about the Hayek-L list or the Laidler seminar, please send a message directly to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Greg Ransom Hayek-L list host [EMAIL PROTECTED] - End Forwarded Message - theglobe.com Your friendly full-service integrated online community. http://www.theglobe.com
Re: some history
I remember hearing a talk a very long time ago by someone who had tried to estimate the costs and benefits to Britain of the empire, and concluded that on net it cost more than it was worth. David Friedman I had also sent my second question to the "Ask the Professor" service at EH.net. THe professor on duty turned out to be Robert Whaples of Wake Forest University, who actually teaches the Industrial Revolution. He sent me the following: ___ Probably the best work on this subject is Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860-1912 by Lance E. Davis, Robert A. Huttenback, Susan Gray Davis. Their evidence shows that Britain generally transfered resource _to_ its self-governing colonies. Very few economic historians would accept the notion that British capitalism depended much on its imperial activities, which were probably a net drain on the economy. This book is packed full of information and discusses India at length. R. Whaples Wake Forest University He also clarified later that "self-governing" colonies was not an oxymoron and was actually part of the classification used in the book. Places like India, which had partially a local government. -- Chirag _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
