From Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution; see item 3 which points to two posts. The first by Felix Salmon (Blogonomics 301 with Tyler Cowen), the second over at The Economist's blog, Free exchange (How to sell books). From Felix Salmon's post, you can download Cowen's talk (the talk is over an hour long, the linked *.m4u file is 250 megs, so watch out).

Lots of interesting stuff in Cowen's talk. I'm wondering, though, how what Cowen says applies to the biblioblogosphere.

In the biblioblogosphere, are blogs loss-leaders that basically promote a good of some sort (either a book or books by the blog author, or the author himself/herself)? Whether intentional or not, do they just serve to promote the author? (If so ... I guess I need to write a book soon)

On an unrelated side note, I'm more and more convinced that "blog reader" really isn't an appropriate term anymore. There may be people who actually read every word written on a particular blog (and therefore are blog readers; if you do that with my humble blog here, wow ... boy, do I appreciate you!) but I think the better label is probably "blog follower". That is, I think people follow blogs, they don't necessarily read blogs. They might read or skim an article that has a provocative title; but they certainly don't read everything. There's no way anyone can really read 200 blogs; but it is possible to follow 200 blogs.

I don't blog about economics often,* but now is the time.

Steve Antler, whose blog is Econopundit, has an interesting idea on a new approach toward oil and our national energy policy.

Check it out.

Also check out this post Antler links to that discusses what oil shale is, and how it might be processable. Speculation? Sure. But we can dream, can't we?

Hey, I'm not an expert on any of these issues (economics, oil development) and I am certainly not advocating tax increases ... but it bears some thought, no? And Antler's method for stabilizing US oil import prices and providing some funds for domestic exploration is alluring, to say the least.

Note to potential commenters: I'm not ruling out or advocating against renewable energy resources (solar, hydrogen, wind, wave, whatever). I say bring 'em all on. But we're stuck with oil for the forseeable future, so we've got to do something.

* BA, Economics, Northwestern College, Class of '93.

So, when I go to Merriam-Webster's dictionary in Firefox, I get a pop-under ad. When I go to the same site in IE, no pop-under. Here's the link I tried. Same link in both browsers.

I think this is interesting from an economic perspective. I'll list a few options I just thought up myself:

• Could it be that Firefox has sufficient market share to make it the primary target of nefarious advertisers? They're more motivated to locate and exploit non-IE-browser-specific holes? That is, have they perhaps lost income because more folks are using Firefox and not seeing their popups, so they were motivated to find and exploit Firefox-specific holes?
• Could it be that IE's status as primary target by nefarious advertisers has paid off? That the market has policed itself and Microsoft's response has been adequate — and since Firefox hasn't had this level of real-world use and testing, a shortcoming was found and exploited?
• Pure chance occurrence; the pop-up dudes got lucky on my config.

Note that I only have out-of-the-box popup handling on Firefox; no extensions dealing with popup blocking. Google toolbar is installed on IE but the popup blocker is turned off; perhaps that may have something to do with it. I dunno. But it seemed strange; I can remember when "popup-killing" was one of the killer features of Firefox.

I'd guess it is a combo of the first two options above.

I see from a post at Marginal Revolution that Dr. Robert Heilbroner has passed away due to an extended illness.

This brings back memories.

In my heady undergrad days, one assignment given in an econ class was to write a letter to an actual, living, breathing economist and ask him questions about stuff.

This was in the early 90's (1991?). Balanced budgets were all the rage; the phrase “Gramm-Rudman” was known by many who weren't into politics or economics (oh that we could be in a similar place now ... Phil Gramm, please do something!). I was a balanced budget zealot. So I chose to send a letter to Dr. Heilbroner asking him how in the world one could advocate deficit spending as a viable fiscal policy.

Not too long after I sent the letter, I received a handwritten response (on a postcard) from Dr. Heilbroner. I'm fairly sure I still have it; I'll see if I can dig it out of my old college papers tonight and post an image of it here sometimes over the next few days. I don't remember exactly what Dr. Heilbroner wrote, but it did have the effect of calming me down a bit.

Update: I went home for lunch, and took a quick look in my old stacks. I found the letter immediately. I had (most likely for a class) finished reading The Debt and the Deficit by Dr. Heilbroner and Peter Bernstein. The assignment to write to an economist came at about this point in time. According to the copy of the letter I sent him, I asked Dr. Heilbroner whether or not the government had a “moral obligation” to repay its debts.

Below are the front and back of the card he sent. The card is typewritten (not handwritten as I earlier mentioned) but is signed. I wrote my letter to him on November 25, 1991. His response is postmarked December 3, 1991. Clicking on either image will open a larger version of the graphic.

and the front of the card:

Note to you young'uns out there: This is how we did things before email (and blogs).

I'm not going to go on record and make any predictions regarding the presidential election. If you know me, you know who I'm voting for.

Under the guise of a post dealing with economic issues, I'm just going to point you to Ray Fair's econometric model that has been quite accurate in the past at predicting elections (see the model's 2000 final prediction). The model is updated every quarter, and new predictions are run.

October 29, 2004 Fair Model Prediction

Note that Fair's model predicts percentages of the two-party vote received by each candidate. So these aren't percentage numbers of all votes cast, these are percentage numbers of only the votes cast for either of the two major parties. His margin of error is 2.5%.

Heck, if you want to, you can play with the numbers on Fair's model yourself and see what happens.

If you live in Whatcom County, polls open at 7:00 AM and close at 8:00 PM. The Whatcom County Auditor's web page has more info, voting guides, etc. There's also a sample ballot that you should check out; unless you've already voted absentee or something.