Knowing and Making

There's no specific point to this picture - feel free to draw your own conclusions. It comes from a neat feature from Google, which I suspect has been around for a while if I'd looked for it earlier. Here's the link if you want to play.

There's a meme around which says that the euro is destined to break up because countries like Greece are fundamentally less productive than countries like Germany. A strategist at Societe Generale has put his name  to this idea, as has the director of the Open Europe (anti-EU) think tank. This argument supposes that the only way to become competitive is to devalue one's currency. But surely this applies within countries too? The southern half of Italy is much less productive than the north, while the reverse is true in Britain. But there are no calls for a London currency and when the lira existed, it was never under the threat of an Italian breakup. Different states in the US are just the same - with widely varying fiscal problems as well as the same diversity of competitiveness. At the individual company scale, Yahoo is less competitive than Google, but does Yahoo need its own currency to devalue? And 22-year-old new college graduate Travis is less productive than his e...

Nothing to do with economics, but...

Media owners are salivating over the idea that Microsoft is going to save them in a hugely expensive attempt to compete with Google. " Microsoft makes move to cut out Google " in the FT: "Microsoft are doing exactly the right thing and asking exactly the right questions," Richard Titus, chief executive of Associated Northcliffe Digital. "Any competition to Google is a good thing," one UK publisher said. Tom Curley, chief executive of the Associated Press, said last month that Microsoft was willing to accept “principles” such as favouring AP stories in search results over others that regurgitate its news, or helping it track its content. “We are only going to work with those who use our principles,” he added. “We stand at an enviable moment where Microsoft and Google have decided to go to war,” he said. You can smell the desperation of people whose business model has been overthrown - not by any underhand behaviour or cheating from Google, but by a world wh...

When Stephen Dubner announced a contest to guess the number of Google hits there would be for "SuperFreakonomics" on November 3, my thought process went something like this: There are about 11,000 results now. There are 1.3 million for "Freakonomics". As the SuperFreakonomics launch comes closer, it will be discussed more and more. But it is unlikely to get close to the total for Freakonomics - partly because many SuperFreakonomics pages will also have the word Freakonomics in them; partly because it's a sequel; partly because Freakonomics is a cultural phenomenon, surely beyond the original expectations, and the chances of Levitt and Dubner hitting two home runs in a row are low (nothing personal, guys, just stats). So somewhere in the 50,000-300,000 range is probably about right. I have no accurate way to predict where it will fall within that range But - just like The Price is Right - success in this contest does not correlate precisely with accuracy; inst...

Today I wasted 45 minutes on a contest to win a £9.99 book. Not rational at all - except for what I learned from the experience, and the satisfaction of feeling cleverer than 651 other contestants. Background information on the contest is here . In short, you need to guess how many Google hits there will be for SuperFreakonomics on November 3rd, two weeks after the eponymous book is published. This is the sequel to Freakonomics , so it should be popular. But how popular? Now this kind of contest has some interesting idiosyncrasies. Like guessing the price in The Price Is Right , or like guessing the weight of a nun - or whatever it is they do in travelling carnivals - your best strategy is not to try to accurately work out the weight. Instead, you should look at what other people have guessed and pick your number to maximise the chance that you'll be just a tiny bit closer than them. You might also recognise this strategy from the "beach vendor problem". In the simplest...