Random Articles

• Demanding Markets in Absolutely Everything “The next logical step, then, would be to make this all personally competitive. The rise of the multi-billion dollar fantasy sports industry — where people bet, or simply compete for bragging rights, by predicting and tracking statistics in everything from baseball and football, to supreme court decisions and Congressional voting — demonstrates how eager people
• Gifted “When a holiday is the pretext and the value of the gift is (possibly) linked to merit, we can self-deceive and believe that a small-valued gift simply represents a cheap gift-giver, or a friendship of uncertain strength, rather than our own lack of merit.” - Tyler Cowen Ouch.
• Just Ignore it and it’ll be a Market Listening to the latest EconTalk Podcast, on the economics of organ donations, the following exchange caught my ear. Russ Roberts: “Markets tend to organize themselves, that’s the marvelous thing about them, if you leave them alone.” Richard Epstein: “If you leave them alone or better, if you know what’s going on and participate in them.”
• China Restates Earnings  “…with the corrected China [Purchasing Power Parity] statistics, the whole question is moot. China is just not that big now and will not get that big any time soon.” - Albert Kiedel of the Carnegie Endowment Kiedel’s article put a number of things into perspective for me - namely why I hear ‘China, China, China’ everywhere
• You Expect What You Pay For Recently - a collegue recounted his experience selling a fully-capable product with a price less than half its competitors. “After the presentation, the customer turned to the sales representative and asked, ‘What’s wrong with it?’” This, more than 78 years after J. Walter Thompson’s research for Pond’s Cold Cream proved that price and quality are directly correlated