Forbes reports that iOS devices accounted for 13.4% of online sales on Christmas day (7% were made from an iPad). Android devices accounted for 7% of Christmas day online sales. While most of this is probably due to people loading new apps on their new tablets and smartphones, the rise of mobile computing is moving at a remarkable pace. The last few months have seen the introduction of a growing variety of $100-200 android tablets and free (older model) iphones and android phones with the purchase of a 2-year contract.
It will be interesting to see how higher education will change in response to the widespread availability of low-cost mobile computing. Will faculty see cell phones and tablets as nuisances to be banned or as useful instructional tools?
As Congress and the President continue to struggle over who can create the most damaging fiscal policy, the Fed announced that it will work alone to try to provide some economic stimulus. Unfortunately, this policy is likely to continue to be ineffective. The graph below explains why.
Providing low-cost reserves to the banking system will have no effect if there are no additional profitable lending opportunities. There will be few profitable lending opportunities when we have so much excess capacity and such sluggish growth. The dramatic growth in excess reserves illustrates this problem very well.
It seems that U.S. policymakers have learned nothing from the lessons of the Great Depression, nor from the more recent experience of Japan and Europe. Monetary policy was remarkably effective since WW II in reducing the magnitude of cyclical fluctuations. The liquidity trap, though, has returned with a vengeance.
I suppose we should be grateful that those charged with monetary policy are not working to make the economy worse.
In one of today’s “fair and balanced” reports, Fox Business News has just placed the Fed in charge of fiscal policy. I hope that they take this more seriously than Congress seems to be.
(Do they have no one there with even a high school understanding of economics? Or can they not afford the compensating wage differentials that would be required to force someone with any knowledge of economics to read through their stuff?)
The Republicans in Wisconsin, in secret session behind locked doors, were able to pass a law last night that prohibits state employees from engaging in collective bargaining for any wage increases that exceed the inflation rate. At first glance, this may seem reasonable, in that it allows state employees to attempt to try to keep up with inflation. In a world in which real productivity growth is usually in the range of 1.5-2.0%, however, this guarantees that the relative pay of state employees will decline over time if such a policy is maintained. While productivity may grow at a slower rate for many public-sector employees (due to the nature of their occupations), equilibrium wages tend to rise by similar amounts in all occupations over time. If they don’t, workers leave the occupations in which relative wages are declining and enter the areas in which relative wages are rising.
If real wages for public sector teachers do not keep up with wages of private sector employees, only the least capable individuals would tend to select public sector employment. Then, you could end up with a Governor and state legislators who are incapable of understanding how labor markets function.
Peter Diamond is one of this year’s recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Yet, his nomination for a position on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors has been blocked for months by Republican Senator Richard Shelby.
In the Nobel committee’s press release, it is noted that the economic models developed by Diamond and his fellow recipients “help us understand the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies, and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy.”
A few months ago, a Pulitzer prize was required to get Mark Fiore’s app on iTunes. Will it take a Nobel Prize to get Diamond on the Federal Reserve Board?
It’s rather hard to believe that this stupidity will prevail.
Caroline Hoxby finds, in a recent study, that the 10% most selective colleges and universities have become more selective since 1962 while the majority of colleges have become less selective. This seems to be related to an increasing willingness of students to attend more distant colleges and universities (possibly due to decreasing transportation and communication costs). Since the most selective institutions receive a larger and more geographically diverse applicant pool, they have been able to become increasingly selective. Increases in financial aid awards at select colleges have further raised the quality of the applicant pool by lowering the relative cost of attendance.
As the most selective colleges and universities have become more selective, the majority of colleges and universities have become less selective. This leads to a growing gap in the average measured quality of students in elite institutions and those in other institutions. On the one hand, this may mean that students end up selected into institutions in which there is more homogenous levels of human capital among entering freshman. This may be desirable for society t0 the extent to which it makes it possible to tailor instruction to students with relatively similar prior academic backgrounds and preparation. To the extent that students learn from their peers, though, the growing homogeneity of student ability within institutions could lead to a growing gap in the amount of human capital accumulation in college. While interactions among the best and the brightest students help to enhance their learning, students in most institutions will have a smaller proportion of peers in the upper tail of the measured ability/performance distributions. The relative rate of return to “select” institutions may continue to rise relative to that of attending more typical colleges and universities if this student quality differential continues to expand.
An interesting article at MSNBC on personal locator beacons provides an interesting example of an economic concept in action. The existence of personal locator beacons lowers the cost to novices of engaging in riskier hiking adventures. This leads to greater risk-taking, especially when society bears some of the cost of the increased risk. We see many similar examples of this concept in action:
The existence of deposit insurance, combined with banking deregulation under Reagan (and later G.W. Bush) encouraged people to place more deposits in those institutions that offered the highest returns, without regard to default risk (since they are insured against that).
Bailouts of financial institutions that have engaged in especially shortsighted and risky behavior may reduce the incentive for other firms to engage in more prudent behavior.
The existence of medical treatments for some of the health consequences of obesity have at least partly reduced the incentives for individuals to watch their diet and exercise regularly.
Edward Glaeser argues in his Economix blog post today that countries with high levels of education are much more likely to have strongly democratic insttutions. While Thomas Jefferson made a similar argument a few centuries earlier, Jefferson’s econometric skills were a bit more limited.
In a political environment (and on an election day) in which prevarication still seems to often be the norm, it is encouraging to think that continuing increases in human capital investment will help to improve political debate over time. John Stuart Mill made a similar point in 1863:
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig
satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because
they only know their own side of the question. The other party to
the comparison knows both sides.
While the news of 3.5% growth in the third quarter of 2009 is encouraging, a full recovery is quite a ways off. The most recent national unemployment rate estimate is 9.8% (seasonally adjusted). As Krugman notes in his blog yesterday, at the current growth rate, it will take about a decade for the unemployment rate to return to something approximating full employment. A Taylor rule policy would keep the Fed at a near-zero interest rate target for the next 6 years.
Unless the pace of economic growth rises, it’s going to be a slow recovery. The last two recoveries were referred to as “jobless recoveries” because unemployment started to improve long after real GDP growth rose. If this occurs again, the economic climate may not feel much better for a while.
… and we wonder why economics is still called the dismal science… It is, though, at least a bit less dismal than in the days of Ricardo and Malthus
Yesterday, Blackboard and ANGEL Learning announced that Blackboard has acquired ANGEL Learning systems, its last major competitor. In 2001, Blackboard had acquired Prometheus; WebCT was acquired by Blackboard in 2005.
From the standpoint of Blackboard, this merger makes a great deal of sense. In 2008, Blackboard’s market share in community colleges fell rather dramatically (I have not yet found statistics for other colleges and universities). The proportion of community colleges using ANGEL last year more than doubled, while the proportion of community colleges using Blackboard fell by about 3 percentage points and the proportion using WebCT fell by about 15 percentage points. The reasons for this shift are fairly obvious: ANGEL is substantially less expensive, has been more responsive to the instructional needs of faculty, is easier to use, offers substantially more features, and has displayed a remarkable record of innovation. ANGEL has been somewhat unique in providing new releases every year that include substantial product improvements and enhanced functionality. The only other company with close to a 5% market share is Desire2Learn, which has had its growth hampered by Blackboard’s lawsuits.
This move also makes sense for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who will be the largest recipient of the $95 million purchase price. The current recession has seriously damaged the budgets of most colleges and universities. This sale represents a convenient windfall in a time of very tight college and university budgets.
Will the Obama Justice Department allow this further reduction of competition in the LMS market? If you would like to voice an opinion on this, give the Networks and Technology Enforcement Section of the Justice Department a call at: 202-307-6640.
Early in the semester this fall, I gave my econometrics class an assignment that included an analysis of the relationship that might exist between poverty rates and student performance across school districts in the region. Students were asked to use economic analysis to state a hypothesis concerning the possible relationship between these variables. Approximately two-third of the students are from the U.S. and the remaining third are from China.
The U.S. students universally argued that students in schools with more poverty would perform less well on standardized tests. The arguments generally involved lower levels of initial human capital endowments due to lower parental education and resources and/or lower school quality because of the use of local property taxes to finance schools. This prediction is what I had anticipated. I had not, though, anticipated that nearly every Chinese student would argue that students from poorer areas would perform better on standardized tests. The argument was that students from low-income families had more incentive to work hard to escape from poverty.
This sort of cultural difference was something that I simply had not anticipated. Our understanding of the world is influenced by our culture and economic institutions in many ways that only become obvious when we interact with people who are part of different cultures and institutional frameworks. We learn most when we are confronted by situations that challenge our expectations and preconceptions. Multicultural experiences such as this provide many possibilities for such learning.
Around the same time, my office hosted a presentation by Jon Rubin, the Director of the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online Learning (COIL). The COIL initiative involves pairing classes in the SUNY system with classes at foreign colleges and universities that investigate similar issues. Students in each class work together on joint projects that are shared and discussed using web 2.0 tools. This allows U.S. (and their foreign counterparts) to interact extensively with students from other cultures and nations without leaving their own countries. This weekend, I attended a COIL conference at SUNY-Purchase. (Representatives from 27 SUNY institutions, as well as several non-SUNY institutions were present at the conference.) There was a remarkable amount of energy and enthusiasm in the discussions at this conference.
Web 2.0 tools such as wikis, blogs, YouTube, and other media sharing sites, make it possible for students to share their work across international boundaries as easily as they share it with their domestic classmates. Skype, instant messaging systems, Facebook, Second Life (and other virtual worlds) make it possible for students to directly communicate with their international counterparts in real time at no cost (other than the cost of their time).
For students that cannot afford to participate in study abroad programs (and the vast majority of our students do not participate in these programs), such an arrangement provides a potential for intercultural and international interactions that would not otherwise exist. I’ve already begun to seek partners for my introductory microeconomics and labor economics classes and for my colleague Said Atri’s classes in international economics. There are, I believe, very strong possibilities for such possibilities in classes in language and cultures, the fine and performing arts, communications, sociology. psychology, political science, business administration, marketing, and even statistics (as the exam in my econometrics class suggested, even the comparison of simple correlations between variables can open up interesting discussions).
Dean Karlan, an old friend and a rising star in the economics department at Yale University, is the founder of Stickk.com, a web site that helps people stick to commitments by using economic incentives. Visitors to the site specify a measurable objective, agree to give up a specific amount of money to another party if they do not meet their goal, and assign a referee to verify their compliance. Dean has already conducted research suggesting that such a commitment device raises the likelihood that people will meet their commitments.
Shortly after posting about Dean Karlan’s Stickk.com initiative, I discovered that Dean was gathering data this past Halloween on the sensitivity of children’s political preferences to candy gifts. It seems that these views, even for very young children, are remarkably inelastic. When children were offered twice as much candy if they supported McCain, Obama’s support among trick-or-treaters fell from 78% to 68%. Dean also found that children that supported Obama were more trusting than children that supported McCain (as indicated by a willingness to accept brown paper trick-or-treat-bags instead of clear ones).
In his most recent blog entry, Gardner Campbell has posted reflections on his visit to Oswego as the keynote speaker (and workshop leader) at our annual symposium on learning and teaching. His keynote address focused on the use of web 2.0 tools to more effectively engage students in their learning. Audio and video transcripts of his keynote address are available from links on his blog posting.
One of the many things that struck me during his talk was the suggestion that the widespread use of course management systems, in many ways, is inconsistent with the web 2.0 world with which students are most comfortable. The closed nature of these systems limits their use in engaging students in a wider dialogue with the academic world and reduces the permanence of their creative work.
The main theme for our work this year at the SUNY-Oswego Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching is on “new forms of communication with students.” Gardner’s presentation and workshop left us with many threads to follow as we work on developing faculty use of web 2.0 and 3.0 tools to more effectively engage students in their learning.
I should also note that, in our discussion on the trip back to the airport, Gardner encouraged me to begin a blog. I had considered this for some time, but Gardner’s suggestion was the tipping point that convinced me that it was time to start.
The Freakonomics blog today has an interesting discussion of a recent study of the insurance status of organ donors and recipients. This study, using data from the 2003 National Inpatient Sample (a 20% national survey), found that 99.2% of organ recipients were covered by health insurance, while only 83.1% of organ donors were covered by health insurance.
For the last several years, I have had students in my introductory microeconomics class discuss, in an online discussion forum, the possibility of allowing individuals to sell the right to harvest their organs after their death. Students are told that they should focus on the use of economic analysis and empirical evidence to to support their arguments. They are asked to refrain from the use of normative arguments. To provide some background reading, students are directed to a web site that I created for SouthWestern College Publishing.
My hope is that students will understand that the use of economic incentives to encourage organ donations is expected to increase the supply of organs, resulting in a reduction or elimination of the relatively severe shortage in the supply of most organs. As the study above suggests, organs are more likely to be donated today by low-income individuals while organ recipients are usually higher income individuals. The introduction of such a payment system would, by reducing the shortage, result in more lives saved (including low income ones) while transferring income (on average) from high-income households to low-income households.
In my class discussions on this topic, though, a very large proportion of students argue that paying people to donate organs would make the organ shortage worse, and would benefit high-income households at the expense of low-income households. Most of the students that make this argument recognize that an increase in the price of a good increases the quantity supplied. They also generally recognize that setting a maximum price of zero on a good will result in a shortage of that good. Somehow, though, this analysis does not seem to work for them when it is applied to human organs.
Perhaps next year, the starting point of the discussion should be Daniel Hamermesh’s seminal work on the sperm shortage.
Webb Miller and Stephan C. Schuster of Penn State have been working on sequencing the genome of the wooly mammoth using recently developed sequencing methods that are more efficient than earlier methods. A discussion of their work appears here, here, and here. It is expected that the genome can be sequenced for $10 million. If this can result in creating clones of extinct species, it will eventually happen.
The recreation of the genome of Neandertherals is not far behind….
A study by David Tuckett (UCL) and Richard Taffler (University of Edinburgh) appearing in the April 2008 issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis finds that stock market bubbles are the result of emotional inflation. The authors suggest that economists should pay more attention to these factors.
My son just called to tell me that up to 3 inches of snow an hour will be falling soon in Oswego, One of the nice things about my office in the library is that there are no windows… so I can assume that the weather is good (one of these days, I should also open my TIAA-CREF retirement fund statements, but I’m assuming that the balance is still growing as it has for years).
In any case, thoughts of the weather remind me of an interesting study by Emily Oster on the effect of changing climate patterns on witchcraft trials. She has also done some other fascinating work, as seen in this video of her TED presentation on AIDS in Africa. A nice summary of some of Emily Oster’s contributions is provided by Levitt and Dubner in this Slate article (notice how, as a 2-year old, she also provided evidence for not relying on a sample of size 1).
Emily Oster helps remind us how important, and how much fun, economic research can be.
ScienceDaily provides an interesting report on the Second China project in Second Life. This project, funded by a $1.25 million federal grant, is designed to provide training to diplomats and military envoys about what they will be experiencing when they visit China. Those using this simulation will experience interactions in an office building, a tea house, a taxi cab, and other experiences that are designed to provide information on the society in whic they will be working. Information on cultural differences are provided within this simlation and on an accompanying website.
An article on ScienceDaily cites a survey that suggests that firms will be focusing more efforts on eLearning and blended learning initiatives to provide internal training. For several years, eLearning and blended has been growing dramaticallty in community colleges, but has been somewhat slower to catch on in 4 year colleges. With reductions in state budgets as state tax revenues decline under current economic conditions, I suspect that we’ll see greater use of these approaches in more colleges and universities.
Economists are often troubled when we hear politicians arguing for policies that, based on all available evidence, would result in outcomes that are antithetical to the goals that they espouse. Many of these policies have been tried, and failure has been well established. We are all familiar with George Santayana’s claim that: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In this light, a recent study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institutute is particularly troubling. This study indicates that politicians (and most Americans) receive failing grades in a test of U.S. history, politics, and economics.
The general public received an average score of 49% on this 33-question multiple choice quiz, but politicians scored worse with an average of 44%. Some of the more troubling results from this quiz:
20% of politicians believe that the electoral college “was established to supervise the first Presidential debates.”
40% believe that the President has the power to declare war (this may seem less surprising since several Presidents seem to have been confused on this issue as well…)
40% of college graduates could not define profit as: “revenue minus expenses.”
20.7% of the public believe that the Federal Reserve can increase or decrease government spending.
Only 16% of the public and 11% of politicians (the lowest score on any question) was able to answer one of the basic economic questions. (Note that purely random guesses should result in a score of roughly 20% since this question has 5 choices.)
Try the test yourself and see how you do. I took it last night and missed one question (on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but I was close on that one…). Some of the questions may be a little difficult, but it is troubling that politicians scored so much lower than the general public.
It appears that Christine Romer will be the new chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. It seems that Obama is meeting his promise to bring back the best and the brightest back to the government, even though they might disagree with some of the policies that he has proposed. This is a very refreshing change.
A recent Zogby poll indicates that the internet is the most trusted news source. Among TV news sources, Fox news is the most trusted (by a large margin).
This represents a decided victory for truthiness and the campaign to save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. (Note that a survey of 7th graders found that 24 of 25 would recommend the Tree Octopus web site as a useful resource to another class that was studying endangered species.)
ScienceToday has an interesting article on a study of the health hazards associated with transporting broiler chickens. In this stidy, Ana M. Rule, Ellen K. Silberbirg, and Sean L. Evans examined bacterial concentrations on cars that drove 2-3 car lengths behind a poultry truck for a distance of 17 miles. These vehicles were found to have significantly raised levels of pathogenic antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the air inside the vehicles. This was true for cars that had closed windows and air conditioners in use as well as for cars with open windows.
This study provides two nice examples of negative externalities for classroom use:
the external costs associated with antibiotic use in factory farms, and
the external costs associated with transporting the chicken.
Personally, I mostly stopped eating chicken once I discovered that it tastes like rattlesnake…
The Freakonomics and Marginal Revolution blogs are each offering “caption the photo” contests on a photo of George Bush congratulating Paul Krugman on his receipt of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Paul Krugman has agreed to decide on the winner of the Freakonomics competition. This should be interesting.
Justin Wolfers, at the Freakonomics blog, offers a great example of consumer surplus. He suggests that his Tivo is bringing his household $240,000 in benefits at a cost of $200. This is a great example to use in an introductory micro class.
The New York Times has an interesting article on the tensions that OPEC is experiencing under conditions of falling demand and rising supply from non-OPEC producers. Unless OPEC’s efforts to reach agreements with non-OPEC suppliers is successful, OPEC’s influence may very well decline.
Catherine Rampell, at the NYT Economix blog, has a very nice post today containing a collection of links to articles and papers on economics topics related to Thanksgiving.
John Maynard Keynes appeared on the cover of the December 31, 1965 issue of Time. The lead article in this issue, quoting Milton Friedman, was entitled: “We Are All Keynesians Now.” In 1971, Richard Nixon, echoed this phrase, just as many economists were moving away from Keynesian analysis. Much of the macroeconomic discussions of the 1970s and 1980s focused on monetarist and new classical critiques of Keynesian economic analysis and policy. Later work focused on representative agent analysis, consumption smoothing, and real business cycle models.
Over the last couple of decades, introductory macroeconomics texts and most macroeconomists had concluded that the day-to-day control of macroeconomic policy is best left to the monetary authorities. From the mid-1980s until very recently, monetary policy had been spectacularly successful, resulting in the two longest economic expansions recorded for the U.S. When dealing with mild recessions, or the threat of a mild recession, the Fed lowered the interest rate and investment spending and consumption spending generally responded quite rapidly, eliminating or mitigating the downturn. This result would not have been very surprising to Keynes. He observed that monetary policy was often effective in preventing recessions. Keynes believed, though, under some conditions, monetary policy becomes ineffective. In Keynes’ words (also quoted by Brad Delong):
To-day and presumably for the future the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital is, for a variety of reasons, much lower than it was in the nineteenth century. The acuteness and the peculiarity of our contemporary problem arises, therefore, out of the possibility that the average rate of interest which will allow a reasonable average level of employment is one so unacceptable to wealth-owners that it cannot be readily established merely by manipulating the quantity of money. So long as a tolerable level of employment could be attained on the average of one or two or three decades merely by assuring an adequate supply of money in terms of wage-units, even the nineteenth century could find a way. If this was our only problem now — if a sufficient degree of devaluation is all we need — we, to-day, would certainly find a way.
But the most stable, and the least easily shifted, element in our contemporary economy has been hitherto, and may prove to be in future, the minimum rate of interest acceptable to the generality of wealth-owners.[2] If a tolerable level of employment requires a rate of interest much below the average rates which ruled in the nineteenth century, it is most doubtful whether it can be achieved merely by manipulating the quantity of money. From the percentage gain, which the schedule of marginal efficiency of capital allows the borrower to expect to earn, there has to be deducted (1) the cost of bringing borrowers and lenders together, (2) income and surtaxes and (3) the allowance which the lender requires to cover his risk and uncertainty, before we arrive at the net yield available to tempt the wealth-owner to sacrifice his liquidity. If, in conditions of tolerable average employment, this net yield turns out to be infinitesimal, time-honoured methods may prove unavailing.
Keynes argued that fiscal policy is the only effective rapid remedy to a the type of economic situation that we are now facing.
As Mankiw notes, there are some problems associated with the Keynesian prescription of increases in government spending and/or tax cuts. Many economists argued, when George W. Bush cut taxes a few years ago (for less obvious macroeconomic reasons), that an increased deficit will often result in a short-term expansion, but will lead to higher interest rates and less investment in the long run. This is not an ideal situation when we are facing very large future deficits in the Social Security and Medicare budgets as baby-boom workers retire over the next 20 years. Ultimately, though, a prolonged and severe recession (such as that experienced by Japan over the last couple of decades) can reduce future per-capita income by much more than is likely to result from the crowding-out effect of higher future interest rates.
For decades following the publication of publication of A Monetary History of the United State (by Friedman and Schwartz), economists debated the relative effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy in addressing the Great Depression. It is clear that monetary policy was not actively used in an attempt to end the Depression. As Krugman notes, though, we are now getting a chance to test the hypothesis that monetary policy can work to end a recession that is brought on by a collapse of the financial system. Bernanke and the Fed have been particularly aggressive and creative in the use of existing monetary policy tools and the creation of new ones. It will be a few months before we have an administration in office that is likely to take steps to begin a fiscal stimulus. Monetary policy has a few more months in which it is effectively the only policy tool under play. If Keynes is right, monetary policy will not be particularly effective in a world in which the current interest rate is too low for people to make many many loans under the current high levels of risk and uncertainty. If Friedman and Schwartz are correct, the economy will start recovering before any fiscal stimulus is applied. My money, though, is on Keynes. It does not pay to bet against the person who, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, predicted that the Versailles treaty ending World War I would set the stage for a second World War.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, the group that dates the beginning and ending points of recessions, has just announced that we have been in a recession since December 2007.
The Marginal Revolution provides an interesting blog post describing an example of a prisoners’ dilemma involving the use of Stickk.com by two Marginal Revolution readers. (I had commented earlier on Stickk.com here.) Ted Frank and Ray Lehmann have each established a contract at Stickk.com in which they commit to losing 60 poinds in the next 9 months. Each agrees to pay the other person $1,000 for every pound that they fall below this target at the end of 9 months. A video statement of this challenge appears here. If one person loses 60 pounds and the other loses nothing, $60,000 will change hands. [Ted Frank provided a correction - this is a bilateral contract arranged independently, and was not done through Stickk.com. 12/10/08]
This is an example of a prisoners’ dilemma game. Both parties can avoid a loss (literally as well as figurately) if they collude (explicitly or implicitly) and both do not lose any weight (or lose the same amount, but less than 60 pounds). The problem, though, is that each individual has an incentive to cheat on any such agreement and lose more weight than the other party. (You can watch follow up videos here when they become available.)
It will be interesting to see how the incentives play out.
Casey B. Mulligan, in a recent blog post, argues that the dramatic growth in the number of unemployed, discouraged, and underemployed workers is the result of a voluntary reduction in labor supply. This should provide a great deal of comfort for that that are losing their homes, their health insurance, and their self-esteem as the economy sinks downward into a depression that is likely to be the most severe that we have faced in the last 50 years.
Similar arguments were made by economists in the 1930s. One would hope, though, that we have learned something since then.
Sometime in the last few years, the Lifestyles Center at SUNY – Oswego began posting posting a one-page Toilet Talk: Words to Whiz By newsletter above the urinals throughout the SUNY-Oswego campus. The current issue (printed on the college’s official hunter green color paper) has an article on the “green” initiative on campus. It notes that people are requested to reduce the printing and distribution of paper copies of materials that could be distributed in other means. I am going to assume that the irony of this was intentional.
Alan Krueger has an interesting 2/9/09 Economix blog post on the cost of patient time spent in acquiring medical care. His rough calculations, based on time use data from the American Time Use Survey, finds that this time cost (if measured at reasonable levels) would have added 11% to the total cost of medical care if this cost were included as part of U.S. medical costs.
Posted by economicalthoughts 
