EconTech

This blog has already welcomed many posts on lying, how to detect it, and how poor we are at doing so. A New Scientist story provides yet another twist in the tale.I interviewed the political broadcaster Robin Day, asking him…
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Will Fisher writes “New iPods will no longer be able to work with Linux. iTunes now writes some kind of hash (SHA1, md5?) to the iPod database which new iPods check against. If this check fails then the iPod reports that it contains 0 songs. This appears to be protection against 3rd party applications writing [...]

Robert Barro emails me:

Did you know that the average Fed Funds rate for August was 5.0%? That is, the Fed already cut rates by a quarter point–it just did not announce it.

He is right: The intended Federal Funds rate is still at 5.25, but the actual rate was 5.02 in August.
In the preceding 13 months, [...]

In an OpEd in today’s Post, Richard Cohen says he accepts all the arguments in The Israel Lobby against supporting Israel, but he remains unpersuaded because the book is too dry and one-sided: A strange thing happened to me while…
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Four years ago the Bush administration, exploiting the political bounce it got from the illusion of success in Iraq, pushed a cut in capital-gains and dividend taxes through Congress. It was an extremely elitist tax cut even by Bush-era standards: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that more than half of the tax breaks went [...]

Several months ago I noted that a virtual world, Eve Online, had hired a real economist. Here is his first report. What makes virtual worlds important for economics is that for the first time ever, macro-economists will be able to…
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In a blog post (”Sicko Sticko Shock“), Marc Cooper discusses his recent hospital bill for a heart procedure of “moderate complexity.” He finds that the amount billed was $116,749. However, the procedure was much cheaper for Mr. Cooper since he had Blue Cross insurance. “In a column lateral to the “amount billed” [...]
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YIAAL writes “Indian journalist Amit Varma reports that Mumbai’s police are requiring the city’s 500 Internet cafes to install keystroke loggers, which will capture every keystroke by users and turn that information over to the government — nearly in realtime by the sound of it. Buy things online, and the underpaid Indian police will have [...]

Take this for what you will: Over the past month, I’ve had at least two dozen conversations with various people about Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. A lot of these people are Democrats, but there were a healthy number of Republicans…
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In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the United Nations Security Council, claimed to have proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He did not, in fact, present any actual evidence, just pictures of buildings with big arrows pointing at them saying things like “Chemical Munitions Bunker.” But many people in [...]