Sunday, April 04, 2004
Back in Somerville Roundup
I've been out of town the past week (hence the infrequent posting). Some interesting stories:
1. This article recaps a recent economics paper which finds virtually no effect of music file sharing on album sales. (The article uses a natural experiment to see whether an exogenous spike in downloads of popular albums is associated with contemporaneous declines in sales of that album). I've always figured the recording industry overhyped this effect; many alternative explanations to declining sales are possible. My favorite is that recently, most music (and certainly everything on Clear Channel stations) has sucked.
2. The big news earlier this week is that the job market finally started to turn around, producing 308k new jobs in March. That's almost as high as the admin estimate for every month this year. Let's hope that it keeps up.
3. And the big news today is that Iraq is exploding, with multiple Shia riots throughout Iraq, and at least nine coalition soldiers killed. The Bushies have always acted like they could invade Iraq and figure out how to secure and rebuild the country on the fly, at a leisurely pace. Now young men are dying every day for the neo-cons hubris and stupidity. When will there be some accountability on this? Why on earth are people like Wolfowitz still on the government payroll?
1. This article recaps a recent economics paper which finds virtually no effect of music file sharing on album sales. (The article uses a natural experiment to see whether an exogenous spike in downloads of popular albums is associated with contemporaneous declines in sales of that album). I've always figured the recording industry overhyped this effect; many alternative explanations to declining sales are possible. My favorite is that recently, most music (and certainly everything on Clear Channel stations) has sucked.
2. The big news earlier this week is that the job market finally started to turn around, producing 308k new jobs in March. That's almost as high as the admin estimate for every month this year. Let's hope that it keeps up.
3. And the big news today is that Iraq is exploding, with multiple Shia riots throughout Iraq, and at least nine coalition soldiers killed. The Bushies have always acted like they could invade Iraq and figure out how to secure and rebuild the country on the fly, at a leisurely pace. Now young men are dying every day for the neo-cons hubris and stupidity. When will there be some accountability on this? Why on earth are people like Wolfowitz still on the government payroll?
