When America is no longer the world
On this week’s Slate Money the author of The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, was a guest. I’m not going to be reading this book, but it seemed interesting. Basically, he suggested that the reason franchise movies, and in particular comic book films, were taking over is that television has taken […]
The supply chain in lieu of the welfare state
The Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a fascinating human interest piece on Dollar General which is dense with insight, How Dollar General Became Rural America’s Store of Choice: The local Dollar General store, built on a rural highway and surrounded by farmland, sells no fresh meat, greens or fruit. Yet the 7,400-square-foot steel-sided […]
The supply chain in lieu of the welfare state
The Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a fascinating human interest piece on Dollar General which is dense with insight, How Dollar General Became Rural America’s Store of Choice: The local Dollar General store, built on a rural highway and surrounded by farmland, sells no fresh meat, greens or fruit. Yet the 7,400-square-foot steel-sided […]
The Elephant, dragon and eagle
The relationship between China and India is clearly one-sided: India is obsessed with a China which is approaching lift-off toward becoming on the verge of a developed nation within a generation (certain urban areas are already basically developed, albeit not particularly wealthy in comparison to Hong Kong or Singapore). Often when I see interviews […]
The Asian world
We live in interesting times. The world system is slowly shifting back to the historical norm. That norm being that most people and economic production would occur in Asia. The book When Asia Was the World chronicles period the between after the fall of the Roman Empirea and on the cusp of the European Age […]
Childhood goes into bankruptcy
Toys ‘R’ Us, Crippled by Competition and Debt, Files for Bankruptcy. This is supposedly restructuring. But do classic toy stores have a future? I know FAO Schwarz closed a few years ago. Remember video stores? Probably not.
Amazon will go to Denver
Lots of discussions last week in the office about where Amazon will locate its second headquarters. After looking at the criteria the consensus converged on Denver. The Upshot did a similar analysis…and settled on Denver as well. The huge downside of Austin is its deficits in transportation. Its airport is relatively modest. The mass transit […]
Nearly 20% of McDonald’s will have electronic kiosks by the end of 2017
McDonald’s hits all-time high as Wall Street cheers replacement of cashiers with kiosks: Andrew Charles from Cowen cited plans for the restaurant chain to roll out mobile ordering across 14,000 U.S. locations by the end of 2017. The technology upgrades, part of what McDonald’s calls “Experience of the Future,” includes digital ordering kiosks that will […]
Amazon purchases whole foods and the distribution channel comes to you
The purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon has sent grocery store stocks into tailspin. Could Amazon do to Safeway and Korger what it did to Borders and Barnes & Noble? Some people have observed that the purchase impacts the nascent grocery delivery sector more than the established supermarkets. That was my first thought. For me […]
The material over the ideological
I come not to praise or bury Max Weber. Rather, I come to commend where warranted, and dismiss where necessary. The problem as I see it is that though a meticulous scholar, Max Weber is the father of erudite sophistry which passes as punditry. Though he was arguably a fox, his genealogy has given rise […]
Economic downturn in 2018?
We’re Getting Awfully Close to Full Employment: The headline numbers for April are terrific. The economy added 211,000 jobs in April, and the unemployment rate fell to 4.4 percent. That is not just the lowest jobless rate in a decade; it also matches the lowest level reached during the mid-2000s expansion. The last time it […]
In a hopeless world hope is better than resignation
There’s really nothing one can say anymore about what Hugo Chavez did to his country, No Food, No Medicine, No Respite: A Starving Boy’s Death in Venezuela. But now in France a left-wing politician is on the rise who praises Chavez, Left-Wing Politician Shakes Up France’s Presidential Race: That man is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, admirer of […]
The Europes
Planet Money recently did a report on the difficulty of maintaining high economic productivity in southern Italy. I won’t rehash the specifics of the story, but, I think it is important to get a visual sense of just how large the contrast between…
The economic correction
Finally the social bubble seems to be bursting. Do remember that in 2000 there was backlash against Amazon as well, and it’s still around. Still, global oil demand level is low. Most people seem to agree that some of the “fixes” to …
The trash index
I heard about the chart above on Marketplace. Track enough variables, and you’ll find some which correlate well with GDP…until they don’t. So this is a neat story, but is it true? Well, I do accept the underlying logic here. So IR…
Thinking like a behavioral economist (dentist edition)
This clip with Dan Ariely telling off a dentist who tried to sell him on a more expensive item is classic. Would that we all behaved in such a manner, no? The problem when you interact with a particular set of professionals, in particular in healthcar…
Economic forecasters should put their $ where their mouth is
Happy Days Are Here Again! Don’t believe the naysayers: An economic recovery is right around the corner.: Economic forecasting is a mug’s game. There are simply too many unknowable factors that affect “the economy” for anyone to make accurate predictions. The Fukushima earthquake and nuclear disaster, for instance, had a noticeably negative macroeconomic impact around […]
India vs. China
India Measures Itself Against a China That Doesn’t Notice: “Indians are obsessed with China, but the Chinese are paying too little attention to India,” said Minxin Pei, an economist who was born in China and who writes a monthly column for The Indian Express, a national daily newspaper. (No Indian economists are known to have […]
Ingenuity’s flight toward rents
Andrew Oh-Willeke, Esq., observes:
One example of cyclicality that continues to today is the practice of law. The basic principles of Roman private law and the complaints that people made about lawyers and litigation were remarkably similar in the 300s…
Geography is dead, long live geography!
Silicon Valley: Not Enough Of A Good Thing:
The right questions to be asking aren’t “why does Silicon Valley create so few jobs;” it’s “why doesn’t everyone move to the Bay Area” (the rent is too damn high) or “how come there’s only o…