EclectEcon

EclectEcon has moved. While I will be keeping this site for at least six months, all new postings will be at:

www.EclectEcon.net
I realize it is a bit of a hassle to reset your bookmarks and links. I resisted making the change, but in the end I just couldn't put it off any longer.

For various reasons, I've been considering moving this blog to a different site. If I do, I'll explain more in the future.

Meanwhile, I would appreciate feedback on this version of the blog, hosted at TypePad. How does it look? Is it easy to use? Etc.

Kip Esquire is thinking of moving his blog from PowerBlogs. I might consider it, too, if doing so were easy. I probably do not have as many requirements as he does, but I would be interested in moving EclectEcon either to WordPress or to TypePad (or something else that permits scheduled posting). I have offered to pay either service to import my blog and domain name, but they seem uninterested in my business.

Like Kip, I am open to suggestions and offers. Unlike Kip, I do not want to do any of the work. I would, ideally, like a seamless transition. If you have any suggestions or if you are interested in doing this migration for me, please let me know.

Who knows, maybe we can work out a two-fer or at least share some of the costs of the learning curve.

Apologies and thanks to all of you who tried to visit EclectEcon during the past 28 hours or so. I have been told there was a fire (no one was hurt) in the building that houses the hosting service for Power Blogs and that they scrambled to get the service up and running as soon as they could.

Thanks for your patience.

Update: Kip is unhappy about the recent frequent outages at Power Blogs and is considering other options. I guess I'm giving other possibilities more serious consideration, too.

As I'm sure you have noticed, my blogging has been light (and will continue to be for the next couple of weeks). Life is busy.

I see the sitemeter for EclectEcon just passed half a million. That's the number of separate page views this blog has had since the hit counter was first installed, shortly after I began writing the blog back in November, 2004.

I can't tell for sure, but it looks as if the 500,000th visitor was someone searching the internet, either for the Nude Magic video or for the Nude Curling Calendar.

A recent e-mail exchange with Phil Miller led me to wonder, how many bloggers have you actually met... in person?

If you are a blogger, let's narrow the field: how many people have you met since you started blogging who were also bloggers when you met them and are still active bloggers? That list is pretty small for me:

1. Phil Miller
2. King Banaian
3. Rondi Adamson
4. Alan Adamson
5. John Lott
6. Mike Moffatt

I also met Tyler Cowen just before I started blogging, and I often see Brian Ferguson (who appears to no longer be blogging despite continued invitations to join me at EclectEcon)

I haven't been posting much lately. Here's why:

While we were in Houston, the screen on my Toshiba M100 started to flicker and then went blank. The computer still worked with an external monitor, but upon our return home, I took my laptop to be repaired (it is under extended warranty*), and I was stuck using an old clunker [a 5-year-old Toshiba Satellite] without much of my software on it.

Meanwhile, I convinced the econ dept to contribute considerably toward a new laptop since they hadn’t ponied up for one for over 5 years (my old clunker). This new one is a bit small, but VERY light and it has a super crisp and bright screen, so I love it (aside from its having some keys in the wrong place, dammit!). It's a Toshiba R500, which weighs only 2.4lbs and has a very crisp screen.

Then my other laptop (the M100) came back from repairs [Future Shop, in case you're interested; they even kept it an extra day to bench test it to make sure it had been repaired properly!].

The screen was dead, remember? So what did the repair depot do? Replaced the friggn hard drive! Fortunately I had backed up all my files before I took it in (I do this at least once a day.... whew!), but I still lost all my regular software and will have to take the computer back to the univ to have it all reinstalled...grrrr (remember, I'm on leave this year and have been avoiding the place as much as possible). And then when I got the computer home (an hour's drive each way), the screen went blank again, after less than a minute.... double and triple grrrrr. I was so angry, I called them and yelled at them, as if that would do any good. So I had to drive back to London on Monday to return it to them.

For my trouble, they gave me a $15 gift card -- whoopee!

So for a week I was trying to get my clunker back up to speed, and then at least a weekend trying to get my new one up to speed. I can't wait to get back to economics, blogging, etc.

*Btw, I ordinarily think extended warranties are a big rip-off, but I’ve never had a laptop last 3 years without SOMEthing going wrong, so I always buy them for laptops.

Stephen Gordon, of Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, laments that there are only two economics blogs still going in Canada: his and EclectEcon. That means this blog is ranked at least second among all economics blogs in Canada. And by some rankings, it is number one.

All the staff associated with this blog will be out celebrating this news this weekend.

CurrencyTrading.net has done some re-organization and re-categorization in its latest list of the top 100 economics blogs. The entire staff here at EclectEcon (all 1 of us, though Brian Ferguson plays a big role, too) are pleased to see that EclectEcon is on the list and in some pretty good company.

See this, which lists EclectEcon among the top 15 international economics blogs (despite using the old name for the blog, it has the correct url).

Canadian economics professor examines economics from a non-U.S.centric point of view. Objective and academically sound theories.

Overall, it's an excellent list of economics blogs, with the serious omission of The Emirates Economist, which ranks quite high in the Technorati rankings.

Update: Gabriel Mihalache's Economic Investigations also deserves mention in the top 100 economics blogs. If you run a graduate programme in economics, read his blog and simply on the basis of that make an admission offer this guy -- he already knows more than many profs.

Congratulations to Scoop (whose photo keeps changing, somewhat mysteriously), Rondi, and Erin for rounding up so many friends, both real and imaginary, to join this group. They're up 47 now.

Jason, Rondi, and Erin are still haranguing me to join Facebook. I'll tell you what. If they can get the group up to 50, I'll join.

Mingle² - Online Dating

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* sex (3x)
* kill (2x)
* abortion (1x)

[h/t to Rondi]

One of my friends has formed a group on Facebook, with the express purpose of trying to get me to join. I have no idea what the value is. Please enlighten me.

Nor is Stephen Pollard.

I have tried to post at least one item every day since I began blogging nearly two and a half years ago, but that degree of regularity may have to end. The opening of the baseball season, the finals in the world curling championships, and now travel on family matters and then to teach at the castle again (plus some additional travel now and then while I am in the UK) all taken together mean that there will almost surely be days now and then over the next three months when I get nothing posted. Just so you know.

Addendum: Also, please let me apologize in advance to all of you who have blogs if I am unable to keep up with reading all of them during the next few weeks.

Craig Newmark has good stuff every weekday at Newmark's Door, but today, April 6th, 2007, is truly exceptional. I won't provide links to the separate short items; just go there and read all four. The entries for today will likely be at the top of his blog for the rest of the weekend, since he rarely posts on weekends. Here are the topics of today's postings:

1. the value of soldiers
2. the British captives and the Geneva Convention [sadly, he has removed this one because the link didn't work. The point was that all the touchy-feeling leftists do not seem to be complaining about Iran's treatment of the British captives.]
3. variations on the "two cows" joke, and
4. fighting medieval religious fascists

If you are not familiar with Newmark's Door, you should bookmark it and read it regularly. It is the first blog I read each day. Craig provides very brief summaries (often just a sentence or two) of, with links to, items available elsewhere on the internet. He finds such interesting material that I follow over half the links.

Low-income people enjoy much more leisure than do high-income people, no matter how you measure it. Steven Landsburg provides an overview of these data and then says that if we want to fix income inequality, we should also want to fix leisure inequality:

[A] certain class of pundits and politicians are quick to see any increase in income inequality as a problem that needs fixing—usually through some form of redistributive taxation. Applying the same philosophy to leisure, you could conclude that something must be done to reverse the trends of the past 40 years—say, by rounding up all those folks with extra time on their hands and putting them to (unpaid) work in the kitchens of their "less fortunate" neighbors. If you think it's OK to redistribute income but repellent to redistribute leisure, you might want to ask yourself what—if anything—is the fundamental difference.

If blogging is work, I have very little leisure time.

It appears that PowerBlogs does not have that irritating "type the letters you see below" feature to eliminate comment spam (if it does, I haven't located the feature). But I've been innundated recently with comment spam and have had to invoke the analogy to opt-in vs. opt-out: comments will not be posted until I approve them. I apologize in advance for the delays.

See this.

[h/t to Craig Newmark]

John Chilton at The Emirates Economist is posting actively again after nearly a month and a half lay-off. His blog is worth checking on a regular basis. Some of the recent postings of interest:

• On habeus corpus.
• The benefits of delaying child birth, and
• Skype in the UAE.

Over the weekend, I looked at BlogNetBiz.com's economics blog aggregator. It looks pretty decent, providing more of each article than is provided by most other aggregators. It is worth a look to see how you like it.

I often order products from Amazon; sometimes I have found that the third-party vendors affiliated with Amazon sometimes offer products not available directly from Amazon and/or have lower prices and/or provide speedier delivery for some items. Until recently I have always been satisfied with my transactions with these third-party sellers (usually used-book sellers). In fact one of them was so good (prompt, efficient at checking on the order, courteous, etc.) that I specifically look for his listings.

Recently, however, I had a problem with one third-party seller. They advertised a product at a lower price than anyone else, and I ordered it from them. Their seller rating showed only that they were new and had no ratings from past customers, but Amazon offered a guarantee, so I figured, "what the heck?"

The place turned out to have been a fraud. Amazon was flooded with complaints as virtually no one who ordered anything from the place received their merchandise.

Two months later, after not a whole lot of trouble, I received a refund credit from Amazon to my charge card. I should be happy, I guess. But I'm not totally happy for two reasons:

1. As with any search process, I gave up the opportunity to purchase the item for the next lowest price when I tried to purchase it from the fraudulent vendor. The lowest available price now is higher than the second lowest price that was available back in August. Oh well....

2. I will be hestitant to order from new sellers on Amazon in the future. It wasn't a lot of hassle getting my refund, but it was a bit of a hassle. I would be far less hesitant if Amazon would implement a policy of holding receipts in escrow for 60 days for new sellers. Knowing this, I would expect that fewer fraudulent sellers would become Amazon affiliates; and as a result, I would feel more comfortable ordering from new sellers. I realize con artists could still build up some positive ratings and then put up thousands of fraudulent listings, but the probability of this happening would be lower if there were an escrow period for new sellers.

I submitted this suggestion to Amazon in several different e-mails, but received only computer-generated form letters in response — that probably ticked me off more than anything else, to be honest.

Details: the order was placed with Amazon.ca before there was any feedback. Here is the feedback to date. Yes, despite what you see there, I do know how to spell "expeditiously". My order was for this:

.

I still haven't reordered it.

Brian Gongol has just posted his updated traffic rankings of economics and business blogs. EclectEcon has moved up considerably since his rankings were last posted, when the blog was below the threshold for being compared with one of the top 200 newspapers in the US.

Of course, the previous ranking was done back in June, while I was teaching in England and barely able to keep up with posting one item per day. During the past month, though, I have gone back to averaging two or three or more postings per day, as I did last spring. Thanks to everyone for reading them.

What if Brian Gongol were to announce when the next sweeps week will occur? Do you think economics and business bloggers would respond to that information?

I'm visiting Phil Miller for a few days to do some work with him on sports economics. While I'm here, though, he and his PowerFamily® are holding a garage sale to get rid of some of their junk.

This could have been a problem for me. I love garage sales, and so to avoid buying more junk, I usually just stay away from them. But in this case my pre-commitment strategy* is that I'm driving Ms. Eclectic's small compact car instead of our family minivan. That way I won't be able to load up on too much of the Miller Family PowerJunk.

*For more on "pre-commitment strategies, see this:

From Brad DeLong on the academic value of blogging (link via Marginal Revolution):

The hope of all of us who blog is that we will become smarter, do more useful work, be happier and more productive, and will also impress our deans so they will raise our salaries. The first three hopes are clearly true: Academics who blog think more profound thoughts, have a bigger influence on the world — both the academic and the broader worlds — and are happier for it. Are we more productive in an academic sense? Maybe. We will see when things settle down.

Are our deans impressed? Not so far, but they should be. A lot of a university's long-run success depends on attracting good undergraduates. Undergraduates and their parents are profoundly influenced by the public face of the university. And these days, a thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed Web logger like Juan Cole or Dan Drezner is an important part of a university's public face. Michigan gains in reputation and mindshare from having a Cole on its faculty. Yale loses from not having an equivalent.

A great university has faculty members who do a great many things — teaching undergraduates, teaching graduate students, the many things that are "research," public education, public service, and the turbocharging of the public sphere of information and debate that is a principal reason that governments finance and donors give to universities. Web logs may well be becoming an important part of that last university mission.

Greg Mankiw comments:

Brad is surely right that most deans are not impressed. In fact, some may be put off by it: "Why is he wasting his time on that activity?"

I have long thought that academia rewards too narrow a range of activities. At research universities, even teaching is given inadequate weight. I will fight for the good teachers before I fight for the bloggers.

If you do not read Craig Newmark's blog, Newmark's Door, every weekday, you should. I especially recommend the postings amassed there today.

Dave Altig at Macroblog has a very comprehensive round-up of recent blog postings from all over creation, all grouped by various economics topics. It is very thorough and useful.

I am pleased to announce that I have been added to the list of faculty members at Fark U. where, of course, we teach economics from "The World According to Fark"*. The concept and programme, intiated by John Chilton, is called Farkonomics.
For more, see here.

*

TAGS: farkonomics

A friend tells me:

I use proxy sites for some of my adventurous browsing. This is the result of trying a Saudi one ...

I realize the screen capture is very low resolution. It is a thumbnail, and you can see the original screen capture jpeg by clicking on it. It says,

Access to the requested url is not allowed!
Please, fill out the form below if you believe the page you requested should not be blocked:
Form for URL unblocking request

Please, send other sites you feel should be blocked using the following form:
Blocking Request Form

During the past week or so, the EclectEcon has been visited by thousands of people looking for the "Women of Curling" calendar. At the same time, the Curling blog hosted by Alan Adamson and me has also received thousands of visits from people looking for the calendar. The visitors have located exactly the same articles, cross-posted to the two blogs, but via different search engines [see here and here].

What is odd is that the visitors were sent to different blogs by different search engines, even though the articles were the same. Almost all the search traffic was sent to the EclectEcon by Google [here is one example], whereas a large majority of the traffic was sent to Curling by MSN search and Yahoo search [e.g. here or here]

I don't really understand the difference. Why would Google send the searchers to EclectEcon, while MSN and Yahoo send searchers to Curling?

Interestingly, Google, which owns Blogger, sent searchers to this blog, which is hosted by PowerBlogs; meanwhile, Google's search competitors sent searchers to Blogger! Go figure.

Last summer or spring (2005), I was invited to join Pajamas Media. I never got around to it, in part because I hate paperwork and just joining looked like more work than it would be worth. But that's just me.

Daniel Gross, writing in Slate, says that the blogging business has peaked or at least is past the go-go stage. Along the way, he has some unkind things to say about Pajamas Media:

The Gullible Latecomers: In the end stages of any investment mania, the clueless and the greedy flood in. You know things are really poised for a fall when people who have no management experience and feeble business plans somehow manage to raise cash for ventures. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Pajamas Media. Last November, the collection of right-wing blogs (with a few lefties thrown in for laughs) grandly announced the closing of a $3.5 million round of venture capital financing. Roger Simon, the screenwriter-turned-blogger who is the CEO of the enterprise, promised "to change the way people report and access news and commentary." I don't know. It looks to me like a bunch of blogs with their own logo.

As you can see from the sitemeter hit counter down along the right sidebar, below all the ads, we are nearing the 100,000 mark for the number of unique visitors to this blog.

It looks as if the blog hit count will reach 100,000 late Thursday or sometime on Friday (possibly as late as Saturday). If you happen to be the 100,000th visitor, do a screen capture and send it to me (no photoshopped jpegs, please), and I'll send you a prize worth more than a reprint of one of my old journal articles and less than our house.

A couple of different articles appeared yesterday in the Mankato, Minnesota, media about Phil Miller's blog, Market Power. [actually they are similar versions of the same article; see here and here.]

Miller avoids political discussions, but he hits economics from a variety of perspectives — some serious, some lighthearted. Miller’s blog provides thoughts on Venezuela’s leftist president trying to jack up coffee prices paid to farmers, the New York City transit strike, the demise of the Vikings Training Camp LLC, and Elmo learning about the complexities and unintended consequences of central direction of an economy in the video “Elmo Saves Christmas.”

Miller compares blogs by academics to a nationwide or worldwide faculty lounge.

Over the past couple of years, I have met some really interesting people in this "faculty lounge", including Phil.

Isn't the internet wonderful? I'm so glad Al Gore invented it.

The server for PowerBlogs crashed yesterday, making this site unreachable. Most of it has been restored now, but the scheduling package that allows me to write things in advance and post them automagically at pre-specified dates and times is still not working.

There is material in the queue for yesterday and today. I'm told it will be up soon.

This is the new location of EclectEcon. While most postings will appear at both the original location and this one for a few more days, please update your links and favourites to www.EclectEcon.com. Thanks!

Something isn't working at TypePad. Here is what they have posted:

Blogs are up. However, we are displaying backup copies of weblogs from a few days ago, so some of your newest content may not be showing.

I am really curious: what kind of commercial service is it that doesn't maintain access to ghost backups, hourly backups, or at the very least, daily backups? Many of my favourite blogs are now showing only postings from a week ago or earlier.

So much for the "45 free days" ...

As if we needed any confirmation, look what happened to the hits on this blog after people started Googling and Yahooing and Whatevering "UWO student strip tease" and related topics, looking for the pictures and videos of the young woman at this university who performed for a roomful of young men:


To follow these data for thirty days, click here. In his observation about a mid-day version of this graph, Phil Miller says,

Ever wonder why there are so many porn sites and why there are so few mostly-economics blogs? Me neither. ...
... It's a demand-side phenomenon!!!!

To tell the truth, I hadn't noticed ...

EclectEcon made it through the first round of balloting and is still in the running! Please go to this site and vote for The Eclectic Econoclast (the former name of this blog).

Today is the last day to vote.

Are those three words inherently boring? Somebody thinks so:

The New Republic once claimed to have discovered the most boring headline ever written: Worthwhile Canadian initiative . The editors argued that the headline ingeniously combined three inherently boring words in such a way as to dissuade even the most adventurous reader from forging ahead into the actual story.

Let me add that our favourite colour is grey and our favourite dessert is tapioca pudding.

[Thanks, I think, to Alex for the pointer]
Update: Brian Ferguson has pointed out to me that there is a distinctly non-boring blog with the title Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.