In a previous post I commented on Everyday Economics, and revealed my (mild) disdain for economists who think they can explain everything.  Well, here’s another example from the New York Times.

But this time, I think they might have it right.  And I particularly like on the comments that asked if there was an equation to predict why we care about celebrities.  That’s been a question I’ve pondered for quite some time, and all I hope is that it would predict for me a “Celebrity Care Index” of zero!

A new article reporting on a recent AAA study posted on Autoblog finds that the average cost of owning a car is almost $9,000 a year. The cost includes insurance, gas, maintenance and depreciation. It does not appear to include interest on auto loans and repair costs. Small cars are cheaper to own and big SUVs are the most expensive. I wonder how much it costs to own a Porsche?

I recently took a look at Pinterest, the latest social network phenomenon to go viral.  It reached 10 million active users quicker than any other social network site.  It’s been accused of being a virtual scrapbook for girls/women and appears to attract a certain age group that’s not young teenagers (they’re still totally immersed in Facebook,) and not much older than 40.  As most people log in using their Facebook account, and can link their Pinterest posts automatically to a Facebook entry, it’s not really competing with Facebook other than for that most scarce of resources, user time.

But is Pinterest adding anything to the Internet?  In an earlier post, I talked about the Internet and originality, and Pinterest seems to be the antithesis of originality.  Just as people cut things out of magazines and paste them into their scrapbook, people see images on the web, and pin them to their Pinterest boards. There are very few original images on Pinterest–perhaps close to none. So what is the value added of Pinterest? According to Wikipedia, “Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more.” Create and manage has been used by some commentators to argue that we are all become, wittingly or not, curators (my apologies to curators around the world.)

In a world in which massive amounts of data/information are being generated and transformed at break-neck rates, there’s clearly a need to organize it, and make it available. Given the almost infinite number of ways to do this, social networks and image collections are becoming not only the new way of curating data, but the definition of curating data. Are regular folk like you and me good curators? I don’t claim to be one, but recognize that simply by posting to my web, I am implicitly making decisions about structure and organization that affect how visitors read, view and absorb the content I am delivering. Is it OK for everyone to be unintentional curators, and if not, can we stop it?

I doubt it.

I was thinking about extreme measures in common usage.  Measures like boatload and shitload, for example.  Which is bigger?  I really don’t know how much is in a shitload of rubbish, do you?

Anyway, I figured that perhaps shitload was originally shipload.  This would make sense, as a ship is bigger than a boat (just like a boulder is bigger than a rock.)  The term boatload referred to a relatively small quantity of stuff, and shipload referred to a larger quantity. I’d like to see us go back to the original terms, as they are far more acceptable for use in good company.

I’m glad that’s cleared up.

Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome…is it the same thing, or not, as recently discussed in The Economist?

It’s appropriate to be talking about opportunity and outcome as the number of Americans in poverty rises, and may get worse, and we argue over the meaning of the 1%-99% divide. I sometimes describe myself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative (and I realize to many that’s an oxymoron, and maybe just a reflection of someone who registers Democrat but thinks they really should vote Republican). But affecting the economic well being of individuals in our society presents a fundamental challenge to anyone who claims to resolve within themselves this ideological dilemma. Being a fiscal conservative means wanting control of your economic outcome, and having the government butt out of affecting it, but being a social liberal means supporting government programs in the name of letting everyone play on the same level field. The irony, and conflict, arises when everyone starts off at the same point but ends up in very different places.

If people start with varying potential (capacity to take advantage of opportunities,) and immediately experience differential opportunities, then it’s almost impossible to imagine equality of outcomes. If all people start with the same potential, the ability to achieve equal outcomes depends on our control over the environmental factors, but they are not only numerous for each individual, they interact in complex ways across groups of individuals. Again it seems impossible to imagine equality of outcomes. That doesn’t mean we should abandon attempts, by the way.

Even if we could affect the path each individual follows, is equality of outcome a generally agreed-to goal? I’ve thought about this when discussing poverty with my public finance students. I distinguish between elimination of poverty and amelioration of the effects of poverty. While, by definition, we can’t eliminate (god forbid!) the poorest 10%, we can make ourselves feel better about how they live. And maybe that’s what public social programs are all about.