CapitalistImperialistPig

If you have exclusive control of a product or resource in high demand, you can extract a monopoly rent from your customers. This is good for you, since you get rich, but generally less good for the economy, since it then produces less than it otherwise might. College textbooks are something of a textbook example. A naive observer might find it peculiar that a college textbook in elementary physics, which differs only minimally from its predecessors of twenty or even fifty years ago, should retail for $230.00, while an only slightly shorter and far more original string theory textbook/monograph sells for one third of that or less. Another oddity is that textbooks, even textbooks in subjects that are changing at the pace of continental drift, get new editions every couple or three years. These things happen because profs have students over a barrel - it can be hard or impossible to do a course without the textbook(s). If the prof isn't using his own book, what's his incentiv...

Anemoma Hartocollis has an article in the the NYT about Getting into Med School Without the Hard Sciences. For generations of pre-med students, three things have been as certain as death and taxes: organic chemistry, physics and the Medical College Admission Test, known by its dread-inducing acronym, the MCAT. So it came as a total shock to Elizabeth Adler when she discovered, through a singer in her favorite a cappella group at Brown University, that one of the nation’s top medical schools admits a small number of students every year who have skipped all three requirements. Ms. Adler became one of the lucky few in one of the best kept secrets in the cutthroat world of medical school admissions, the Humanities and Medicine Program at the Mount Sinai medical school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Because when I need to see a doctor I will be really glad that they blew off the scientific foundations of their discipline in favor of varsity tennis and a world tour. Among the current c...

Megan McArdle is a conservative economist/blogger with relatively rational climate skepticism (compared to the usual fact proof crackpots and idiots). You can read her post on the possible phytoplankton die-off. My untrustworthy summary: we might be doomed, probably can't do anything about it, but should have a hefty carbon tax. Of more interest to me was this comment from aka_scoop: I won't give serious consideration to the arguments of any eco-doom prophet who does not first demonstrate that he has invested all his money in a way that hedges against that which he professes to expect. The more extreme the predictions, the more extreme the investment must be. If these guys haven't spent all their money on -- I don't know -- oxygen tanks, canned food, firearms and property on very high ground, they should shut up. Because there's no internally consistent way that a person could actually believe such things while spending their lives blogging from costal cities......

I just got my first Kindle, so I'm a few years behind the techno-curve, but that's no reason that I shouldn't start talking about what a good e-reader really ought to be. First, everybody knows that the real bucks are in textbooks. Second, everybody also knows that current textbooks suck. They are bulky, heavy, hard to manipulate and search, and, worst of all, they just lie there, like the dead trees they are. So what should a good e-reader be? It's got to be sharp like a Kindle, colorful like an I-Pad, and it's got to be coupled to powerful educational software. Who want's to spend big bucks on a textbook only to still have to drag yourself out of bed at 11 AM to go to a lecture? A good textbook ought to store any lectures and display them on screen (or your television) when you're darn good and ready. References should be hot linked to the relevant portions of the referent. Equations, graphs, and data ought to be live, manipulable, and coupled. If...

The Drake equation is an attempt to estimate the probability of contacting intelligent life on other planets, or, more generally, the probability that intelligent life exists on other planets. It is expressed as a product of a bunch of probabilities all of which were largely unknown when it was formulated nearly fifty years ago. Some of the more important were the fraction of stars with planets, the fraction of planets that were Earth like, and the probability of life arising on an Earth like planet - all of which were squarely in the unknown category a half century ago. Many hundreds of planets have now been discovered around nearby stars, and a significant fraction of them are apparently Earth like in size at least. One investigator suggested something like 100 million Earth like planets in the Galaxy - about one for every 1000 stars. The probability of life arising on such a planet is still unknown, but there are increasingly strong hints that it could be substantial. That still le...

The latest news from Wikileaks confirms many of our fears and raises new ones. Not News: The Taliban has bases in Pakistan Not News: Elements of the Pakistani government (if not all of it) collaborate with them. Possible News: the Taliban may be acquiring more potent weaponry. Hardly News: We are financing the war against ourselves. The grim reality: There is no hint that anything that could be called victory lies ahead. We are probably fighting this war now because our political leaders lack the courage to end it with victory or retreat. Victory, if possible, would be messy. We would have to smash the Taliban in Pakistan, and quite likely the Pakistani military as well. Wholesale slaughter in the Northwest territories (soldiers, sheep, goats, and civilians) would likely be required. India and US bases in Afghanistan might get nuked. Retreat wouldn't be pretty either. al Quaeda would be emboldened. The mess George Bush left in his wake just gets deeper. America's future ...

One of the topics on today's Sunday talk was the Shirley Sherrod affair, accusations of Tea Party racism, and race in America. David Brooks slithered out with the usual lamotronic responses in defense: everybody does it and I even saw Tea Partiers and actual Black People talking amicably on the mall. Not only that, but Sherrod was being racist when she said Andrew Breitbart wanted black people to be slaves again. Let's take up the last point first, and start by reviewing the facts, which no one on the panel challenged: Andrew Breitbart posted a dishonestly edited video which made Sherrod look like a racist, getting her fired and exposed to public opprobrium in the national press. I say that she's entitled to be angry and entitled to a few intemperate words in characterising the SOB. Now it happens that I doubt her diagnosis of his motivation. I think that it was equally sinister but more pragmatic: he wanted to inflame racial fears and hatreds in order to embarrass the gove...