Ladenschluß.
Shopping from midnight to 4am, in Germany. It’s possible – at least for promotional reasons. Last Saturday, a couple of hundred of local retailers celebrated the “night of the senses”, during which shops were allowed to open. Apparently, the project’s revenue was satisfactory, as 100,000 people decided to postpone their shopping from Saturday afternoon to [...]
read onBlogging the GDR.
About two weeks ago I had dinner with my parents and one of their oldest friends who was in town for a day. Like my mother, he hails from the eastern part of Germany, the part formerly known as German Democratic Republic. Unlike my mother, he stayed there until the bitter end. I was inclined [...]
read onDigitally Scared.
I’ve just put up a longer post about the EU’s Intellectual Property Right Enforcement Directive over at fistful. So in case you’re interested, click here to read.
read onBlogs are really different.
To those who haven’t yet had the opportunity to read about Loic LeMeur’s efforts in bringing together the loose ends of the Germanic blogosphere, I say – do so. When I went to meet him and some other bloggers I had never seen or even heard of before, I was not too sure what to [...]
read onPulling Plugs.
I’ve Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway – I saw the Empire State laid low. And life went on beyond the Palisades, They all bought bright Cadillacs- And left there long ago. We held a concert out in Brooklyn- To watch the Island bridges blow. They turned our power down, And drove us underground- [...]
read on“Has Globalization Gone Too Far?” by Dani Rodrik
Has Globalization Gone Too Far? by Dani Rodrik – A Harvard economist questions some fundamental institutionalised myths of economic reality and tells his readers to think about the fact that increasing the size of the pie may not always justify the costs of the social upheaval involved in redistributing the pieces.
read on
“The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics” by William Easterly
The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William Easterly. Good Stuff. Exciting economic history of economist’s attempts to further economic growth in developing countries in the course of the last 50 years.
read onTime To Say Goodbye.
“On Thursday, Volkswagen’s plant in Mexico — the only one in the world which still makes the old-style Beetle — launches one last retro edition of the plucky bug before bringing down the curtain on nearly 70 years of history.” (from Reuters.)
read onToo cocky indeed.
Just two links to articles in today’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung in this post. But since they are about Mr Cocky mentioned in the previous post I decided to put them here. In the first article, Juergen Peters is described as failed missionary, while the second reports that some people in his union want to see his [...]
read onStrange Happenings…
Now at least the universe loves us ;-). From sixsixfive via Le Sofa Blogger… Entirely unrelated – the desk-cleaning action did take longer than expected, so I won’t be able to comment in lenght on this weekend’s exciting developments in German politics. The proposed accelrated tax break is quite remarkable in itself, as is the [...]
read onSaddam’s new small change.
Apparently, lack of small change is strangeling the Iraqi economy to an extent that the US administration has decided to begin reprinting old Iraqi 250 Dinar notes (about $ 1,50) featuring the face of – he who must no longer be named on the streets of Baghdad (via Sueddeutsche Zeitung)
read onCAP. Again.
However much I am fascinated by institutionalised European cooperation (aka EU), there’s one policy area in which even the most pronounced criticism is likely to be insufficient: The Common Agricultural Policy – reform resistent. Not that the US is only concerned with its effects on the world’s poorl, given the US farmers’ export interests, but [...]
read onTwo Economists, Three Opinions.
More and more people are getting concerned about the risk of deflationary tendencies. Not so the FT’s Tim Lee who believes that “Inflation is a bigger danger than deflation“
read onZeitenwende. End Of An Era.
It took some time and more of their money to make Germans understand. It took more than ten years of subsidizing consumption and unemployment in a previously bankrupt former communist economy and virtual non-growth to make us see that it is not only necessary to think about the problematic long-term consequences of the current incentive [...]
read onMuch Ado about not much.
The McKinsey Quarterly looks at the incentive effects of the Bush dividend-cut proposal and decides that it, well, is largely a placebo. Won’t hurt, won’t heal, as most shares are held by tax-exempt entities anyway – “The fact, however, is that tax-paying US individual shareholders own a minority of all US shares?28 percent in 2002, [...]
read onThey’ll get the pricing wrong.
For at least five years. If you search my blog you will find that I have repeatedly said that all attempts to sell musical downloads will suffer from problematic price policy. Apple’s new itunes download service is no exception. True, it is probably closer than anything previously seen to actually enhancing the user experience with [...]
read onThey take no chances.
If this report by Telepolis is right, then Hillary Rose, the former chief RIAA lobbyist, is currently rewriting the copyright laws of Iraq. Just in case the Iraqi ideas about intellectual property rights should differ from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Actually, the journalist Gregory Palast is not unjustifiedly wondering whether the combination of [...]
read onSemi-daily discussion on Sen’s paradoxon
A neat little discussion occurring at Brad DeLong’s Semi Daily Journal, regarding the question whether Sen’s paradoxon – which basically says that it is possible to dream up utility functions which would allow liberalism and the pareto principle to be in conflict – is actually a paradoxon. And it is evolving into a real debate [...]
read onDe-Merging Patriotism
Last year, Michael Wolf, a director in McKinsey�s New York office, published an article in the WSJ (here via McKinseyQuarterly) explaing that market forces – especially a sluggish advertising market and the general trend to digital distribution – would continue to pressure media companies to merge into ever larger entities. Mr Wolf’s article was triggered [...]
read onDigital timeshifting.
Update Please note that the legal situation regarding file sharing in Germany has changed since and is likely to change again. Now that , a US court has denied the forced closure of P2P services like KaZaa (from heise online), as they are also used for legitimate purposes, look forward to intensified attempts to target [...]
read onChampagne Blogging
this is my first attempt at live-blogging, so give me some credit here… i am writing this on a public terminal in the museum fuer kommunikation in frankfurt, typing with only one hand, as i am holding a glass of champagne in the other. it is the “long night of museums” here and on of [...]
read onDeLong Run.
Brad DeLong at his best. He’s always there for us when it’s about time to leave the dreadful current international affairs aside for a moment and delve into the long term streams of human development. And which of them could be more important than the history of economic thought?
read onThe Other War
One of the real problems of the Iraq induced congestion of the media is that there is so much more important stuff going on that no body hears about – well, at least, that a lot less people hear about than should hear about it. One of the big issues which currently receive a lot [...]
read onUnderstanding The Bush Economic Stimulus Package. W’s getting scared.
I don’t know if I am understanding the package correctly. Most of those throwing their opinions in the ring certainly know American politics a lot better than I do. Their predominant interpretation of the package is that it is not actually intended to stimulate the US economiy but to get Bush reelected in 2004 – [...]
read on