Archive for August, 2008
SEO: A Waste of Resources?
Monday, August 25th, 2008This past weekend I attended a conference on online marketing. My brother sells cb radios online for a living and he invited me along to learn more about e-marketing. It was a lot of fun and really informative. Many of the speakers talked about search engine optimization (SEO). If you’re not already familiar with SEO, […]
Student Blogging: Brilliant or Boring?
Thursday, August 21st, 2008I’ve been preparing for the Intermediate Microeconomics class I will teach this fall. While working on my syllabus, I considered creating a blog and assigning each student in my class to contribute a post. I thought it would be a good way to get students thinking about economics in their everyday lives and would offer […]
Baseball Blogging
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008Sports are fun, and awash in data. It shouldn’t be surprising then that economists love to study them. For example, the best-seller Freakonomics discussed cheating in sumo wrestling and academics recently examined point shaving in professional basketball. Blogs such as Sabernomics and The Sports Economist are devoted to the application of economics to sports. While […]
The Carbon Cutting Quandry
Monday, August 18th, 2008Jim Manzi at Cato makes some great insights into the global warming debate in this post (HT econlog). I particularly enjoyed his criticism on using a zero-discount rate to calculate the present value of the costs of global warming. He notes that 50% of the world’s 2008 GDP is equal to .1% of the world’s […]
Why do CEOs Make so Much Money?
Thursday, August 14th, 2008Fortune 500 CEOs are constantly criticized for their excessive salaries. Over the last few decades their wages have been rapidly rising while the median wages have been stagnating. See the graph that illustrates that: “In 1965, U.S. CEOs in major companies earned 24 times more than an average worker…Since then, however, CEO pay has exploded […]