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Noted for December 15, 2012

Worth Reading:

  • Want Superfast Google Internet? Book a $49 Night at the Hacker House

  • Apple gets thrown in the briar patch: "Sounds to me like playing hardball got Apple most of what it wanted [over Maps]. Reminds me of Flash."

  • Adam Posen: Osborne needs a change of direction: "The coalition government has failed to address the shortfall in productive British investment…. [F]iscal stimulus… hould be adopted in the form of aggressive investment tax credits to non-financial business…. [T]he UK needs to create a credit market that lends to projects in the small and medium business sector that can’t get credit…. [T]he government needs to create more competition in domestic banking… Fourth, to further promote both domestic financial development and bank competition, the government should create a sizable specially chartered public bank for lending to small businesses, and accompany it with creation of a Fannie Mae-like company to bundle, securitise, and sell those British enterprise loans…. Finally, the government should restore public investment levels, with an emphasis on large infrastructure projects. As Gavyn Davies, former chief economist at Goldman Sachs,  has pointed out, British public investment has fallen by a quarter since 2010. That is a huge reduction, and is self-defeating in terms of short-run revenues and long-run growth…. It is not enough for Messrs Cameron and Osborne to claim that they have done what they promised to do. Their policies have left the British economy malnourished, and indeed made parts of it quite ill. There are alternatives available, and the British government should switch to these now."

  • Mark Thoma sends us to Tim Taylor: 'Cautionary Details on U.S. Manufacturing Productivity': "Susan Houseman has been digging down…. After reading Houseman, when you hear the standard story about how high productivity in manufacturing is leading to reduced employment, the following thoughts should rattle through your head: (1) Most of the productivity growth in manufacturing is computers…. 'The computer industry is small—it only accounts for about 12 percent of manufacturing’s value added…. But we find that without the computer industry, growth in manufacturing real value added falls by two-thirds and productivity growth falls by almost half…'. (2) Most of the productivity growth in manufacturing computers is because computers are becoming so much faster and better over time…. (3) A sizeable share of what looks like growth in manufacturing productivity is actually from importing less expensive inputs…. 'Our statistical agencies try to measure price changes, but they miss them when the price drops because companies have shifted to a low-cost supplier. So because we don’t catch the price drop associated with offshoring, it looks like we can produce the same thing with fewer inputs…. It also looks like we are creating more value here in the United States than we really are.' (4) If productivity in manufacturing rises because of automation, then those gains in productivity may benefit the owners of the machines…. (5) If low-wage labor-intensive manufacturing tasks are now more likely happen overseas, an higher-wage tasks remain in the U.S., then it may appear as if the productivity of an average U.S. manufacturing worker is higher--but it's just a shift in the composition of U.S. manufacturing workers…. Add all these factors up, and the condition of U.S. manufacturing looks more ominous than the standard story of high productivity and resulting job losses."

  • Ezra Klein: Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States

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December 14, 2012 at 22:00 in #weblogging | | Comments (2)

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