Category: Economics

“Forgotten not for lack of importance, but for lack of theoretical frame-works”

A paper by current head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, Ed Lazear, is significant for what it says near the end about economists forgetting facts, because the facts do not fit into current theory.

(p. 260)  Human capital theory is primarily a supply-side approach that focuses on the characteristics and skills of the individual workers.  It pays far less attention to the environments in which workers work.  As such, the human capital framework has led researchers to focus on one class of questions, but to ignore others.  Specifically, little attention has been paid to the jobs in which workers are employed. 

(p. 263) The fact that some jobs and some job characteristics are more likely to lead to promotions than other jobs is not surprising.  But the analysis suggests that other ways of thinking about wage determination, namely, through job selection, may have been unduly ignored in the past. 

. . .

Researchers have begun to make jobs rather than individuals the unit of analysis.  This change of focus can illuminate new issues and provide answers to questions that were once posed and forgotten.  The questions were forgotten not for lack of importance, but for lack of theoretical frame-works.  The theory is now developed and awaits confirmation in the data.

 

For the full paper, see:

Lazear, Edward P.  "A Jobs-Based Analysis of Labor Markets."  American Economic Review 85, no. 2 (May 1995):  260-265.

(Note:  elipsis added.)

 

Career Opportunities for Economists

  Econ major, and rap recording artist, Stat Quo.  So who says economists aren’t cool?  Source of photo:  http://www.statquo.com/

 

According to Wikipedia, up and coming rap artist Stat Quo earned a 3.54 gpa, while majoring in economics at the University of Florida. How’s that for refuting the stereotypes about economists?

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stat_Quo

 

“Atlas May Actually Decide to Shrug”


(p. A16) During the recent off-year elections, the president repeatedly pointed to the booming economy and noted that his tax cuts were responsible.  With growth strong and unemployment low despite the ending of the stock-market bubble, terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq, he had every reason to be proud.  Moreover, both economic theory and the actual timing of the economic revival support his claims regarding the tax cuts.

That is why it is so odd that rumors swarm around Washington that the president may be willing to raise taxes as part of a "deal" on entitlement reform.  In particular, the rumors suggest the president might be willing to get rid of the provision that caps the income level used to compute Social Security taxes and benefits.  These rumors aren’t without substance; last year the president would not rule out raising the cap when asked.

Doing so would raise the marginal tax rate on the entrepreneurs that Mr. Bush credits for having led the economic recovery by more than 10 percentage points.  The new effective rate would be five percentage points above the level when he took office.  Moreover, in 2011, the rate would go up a further 4.3 percentage points to an effective 53% marginal rate on entrepreneurial income.  The president would thus be not just raising taxes on entrepreneurs to well above the levels that prevailed in the Clinton administration, but to a rate higher than that which prevailed in the Carter administration.  Most of the improved incentives for entrepreneurship and work brought about under Reagan would be repealed.

. . .

Last year an entrepreneur similar to me would have paid federal taxes equal to 33.9% of total income.

. . .

Don’t make it too tough on him, or Atlas may actually decide to shrug.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

LAWRENCE B. LINDSEY.  "Compromised."  Wall Street Journal  (Mon., November 20, 2006):  A16.

(Note:  the ellipses are added.) 

 

The last line of the commentary is a not-so-veiled allusion to: 

Rand, Ayn.  Atlas Shrugged.  New York:  Random House, 1957.


“Nebraskans Preparing for the Imminent Arrival of Several Million New York Refugees”

(p. 12) HOUSING prices are falling on both coasts, and bubble panic is around the corner.  The financial magazines are already grabbing their readers by the throat and taunting them with headlines like:  ”U.S. Housing Crash Continues!” ”Where Will Housing Prices Fall the Most?” ”Is It Time to Cash Out?”

What if it is time to cash out?  Where do you go?  If you sell on either coast, then you need to find real estate somewhere that the housing bubble missed.  Guam?  American Samoa?  Wait, how about eastern Nebraska?  Downright frothless when it comes to housing:  the median home price here usually chugs along at the annual rate of inflation and never goes down (up 4 percent last year, up 22 percent over the last five years).

Before you recoil in horror at the thought of living in Omaha, a city of 414,000 souls, consider that this year Money magazine ranked it seventh of the nation’s 10 best big cities to live in, ahead of New York City, which ranked 10th.  O.K., now you may recoil in horror.

These compelling statistics have Nebraskans preparing for the imminent arrival of several million New York refugees (victims of post-traumatic bubble anxiety disorder), who will need emergency real estate and housing triage services.

 

For the full commentary, see:

Richard Dooling.  "Sweet Home Omaha."  The New York Times, Section 4 (Sunday, October 29, 2006):  12.

Jeffrey Sachs “Has Apparently Spent More Time Studying the Economic Thinking of Salma Hayek than that of Friedrich”


  Salma Hayek.  Source of image: http://www.imdb.com/gallery/granitz/0273-spe/Events/0273-spe/hayek_sa.lma?path=pgallery&path_key=Hayek,%20Salma

 

(p. A18) Scientific American, in its November 2006 issue, reaches a "scientific judgment" that the great Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek "was wrong" about free markets and prosperity in his classic, "The Road to Serfdom."  The natural scientists’ favorite economist — Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University — announces this new scientific breakthrough in a column, saying "the evidence is now in."  To dispel any remaining doubts, Mr. Sachs clarifies that anyone who disagrees with him "is clouded by vested interests and by ideology."

This sounds like one of those moments in which the zeitgeist of mass confusion about national poverty, world poverty and prosperity comes together in one mad tragicomic brew.

. . .  

Mr. Sachs, who is currently best known for his star-driven campaign to end world poverty, has apparently spent more time studying the economic thinking of Salma Hayek than that of Friedrich. 

. . .

Mr. Sachs’s empirical analysis purports to show that Nordic welfare states are outperforming those states that follow the "English-speaking" tradition of laissez-faire, like the U.K. or the U.S. Poverty rates are indeed lower in the Nordic countries, although the skeptical reader (probably an ideologue) might wonder if the poverty outcome in, say, the U.S., with its tortured history of a black underclass and its de facto openness to impoverished but upwardly mobile immigrants, is really comparable to that of Nordic countries.

Then there is the big picture, where those laissez-faire Anglophones in, first, the U.K. and, then, the U.S., just happened to have been the leaders of the ongoing global industrial revolution that abolished far more poverty over the past two centuries than a few modest Scandinavian redistribution schemes.  Mr. Sachs apparently thinks the industrial revolution was led by IKEA.  Lastly, let’s hear from the Nordics themselves, who have been busily moving away from the social welfare state back toward laissez-faire.  According to the English-speaking ideologues that composed the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom, Denmark, Finland and Sweden were all included in the 20 countries classified as "free" in 2006 (with Denmark actually ranked ahead of the U.S.).  Only Norway missed the cut — barely.

Mr. Sachs is wrong that Hayek was wrong.  In his own global antipoverty work, he is unintentionally demonstrating why more scientists, Hollywood actors and the rest of us should go back and read "The Road to Serfdom" if we want to know what will not work to achieve "The End of Poverty."  Hayek gave the best exposition ever of the unpopular ideas of economic freedom that somehow triumph anyway, alleviating far more national and global poverty than more fashionable Scandinavia-envy and grandiose plans to "make poverty history."

 

For the full commentary, see:

WILLIAM EASTERLY.  "Dismal Science."  Wall Street Journal  (Weds., November 15, 2006):  A18.

(Note:  ellipses added.) 

 

Hayek’s courageous masterpiece is:

Hayek, Friedrich A. Von. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1944.

 

Easterly’s great book on how to encourage economic development in poor countries, is:

Easterly, William. The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.


We Will Always Want More Income

Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and many others, have suggested that there is some level of income at which we will have enough, and want no more. 

David Friedman, in his price theory text, and others, have doubted this.  I am with the doubters.  I suspect that we sometimes think a certain amount of money would satiate us, because at some level way beyond our current income, it does not reward us to think too much about how we might spend so much money.

But if you are Rockefeller, and you see what good comes with founding universities, curing diseases, and the like, then you can easily imagine what good would come from even more money, even if, like Rockefeller, you are the richest person on the face of the earth.

In the discussion excerpted below, Robert Frank gives another argument for joining the doubters:  that as our income rises, so do our standards for quality.  (I think this argument is sound, but less important than the one sketched above.)  

 

When my wife and I were living in Paris a few years ago, we went out to dinner with well-to-do friends who were visiting from the United States.  The restaurant we chose had a good reputation and, by our standards, was not cheap.  But although my wife and I enjoyed our meals enormously, our friends found theirs disappointing.  I’m confident they were not trying to impress us or make us feel inferior.  By virtue of their substantially higher income, they had simply grown accustomed to a higher standard of cuisine.

. . .

By placing the desire to outdo others at the heart of his description of insatiable demands, Keynes relegated such demands to the periphery.  But the desire for higher quality has no natural limits.  Keynes and others were wrong to have imagined that a two-hour work week might someday enable us to buy everything we want.  That hasn’t happened and never will.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

ROBERT H. FRANK.  "ECONOMIC SCENE; The More We Make, the Better We Want."  The New York Times  (Thurs., September 28, 2006):  C3.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

 

Copenhagen Consensus: Money Spent on Global Warming Would Do More Good Elsewhere


(p. A12) The report on climate change by Nicholas Stern and the U.K. government has sparked publicity and scary headlines around the world.  Much attention has been devoted to Mr. Stern’s core argument that the price of inaction would be extraordinary and the cost of action modest.

Unfortunately, this claim falls apart when one actually reads the 700-page tome.  Despite using many good references, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is selective and its conclusion flawed.  Its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalized, which is ultimately only likely to make the world worse off. 

. . .  

Mr. Stern is also selective, often seeming to cherry-pick statistics to fit an argument.  This is demonstrated most clearly in the review’s examination of the social damage costs of CO2 — essentially the environmental cost of emitting each extra ton of CO2.  The most well-recognized climate economist in the world is probably Yale University’s William Nordhaus, whose "approach is perhaps closest in spirit to ours," according to the Stern review.  Mr. Nordhaus finds that the social cost of CO2 is $2.50 per ton.  Mr. Stern, however, uses a figure of $85 per ton.  Picking a rate even higher than the official U.K. estimates — that have themselves been criticized for being over the top — speaks volumes.

. . .  

Last weekend in New York, I asked 24 U.N. ambassadors — from nations including China, India and the U.S. — to prioritize the best solutions for the world’s greatest challenges, in a project known as Copenhagen Consensus.  They looked at what spending money to combat climate change and other major problems could achieve.  They found that the world should prioritize the need for better health, nutrition, water, sanitation and education, long before we turn our attention to the costly mitigation of global warning.

We all want a better world.  But we must not let ourselves be swept up in making a bad investment, simply because we have been scared by sensationalist headlines.

 

For the full story, see: 

BJORN LOMBORG.  "Stern Review."  Wall Street Journal (Thurs., November 2, 2006):  A12.

(Note:  the ellipses are added.)

 

Is Variety Good?

Chris Anderson has a stimulating and useful chapter in The Long Tail on why having variety and choice is good.

Not all agree.  My old Wabash economics professor, Ben Rogge, with wry amusement, used to refer us to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock.  Toffler’s view was that choice was stressful—visualize the Robin Williams’ Russian émigré character in "Moscow on the Hudson," when he collapses in panic on not knowing how to choose amongst the variety of coffees in the Manhattan supermarket aisle.

What amused Rogge was the contrast between the old critics of capitalism, who criticized capitalism for providing too few goods for the proletariat, and the new critics, like Toffler, who criticized capitalism for providing too many goods for the proletariat. 

Although Toffler has recanted his earlier views, others, such as Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice, have picked up the anti-choice banner.

Here’s my current two cents worth.  Sometimes we value variety for its own sake, and sometimes not.  I may find the variety of ethnic restaurants exciting, but not the variety of music on I-tunes.

But even when I don’t value variety for its own sake, I still may value it because it increases the odds that the product I can find matches the product I want.  Let me explain.

In the language of Clayton Christensen and co-author Raynor, in The Innovator’s Solution, generally what I want is a good that does well, a "job" that I want or need to get done.

Some critics of mass production descried the loss of the variety of products produced by pre-industrial craftsmen.  But what good did it do the peasants that no two chairs were quite alike, if all of them were too hard and misshapen for the job of comfortably sitting in them?

Mass production reduced variety, but increased quality, in the sense of bringing (cheaply) to market, products that were far better at doing the jobs that most people wanted/needed to get done. 

If the modern varieties of chairs are a response to differences in the jobs that different consumers need to get done, then I might generally, and accurately, presume that variety is usually good, not because I want to constantly sample a lot of different chairs (like I want to sample a lot of different ethnic foods), but rather because variety increases the odds that I will find the one or two particular chairs that allow me to do the job that I want a chair to do for me.  

Specifically, recently, we were looking for a chair that was firm, spill-resistant, would swivel to allow talking to someone in the kitchen, would recline for watching television, would be dog-chew resistant, and would have a color/fabric complementary to the rest of the furniture.  We shopped at Nebraska Furniture Mart, which is the largest furniture store in the U.S., with the greatest selection, because we hoped to find the one chair that would do all of these jobs.

We came close, but I wish there was a store with even greater selection.

   

Does Focus on Scarcity, Blind Us to Abundance?

Chris Anderson ends chapter 8 of his stimulating The Long Tale, with a provocative jab at economists:

(p. 146)  Finally, it’s worth noting that economics, for all its charms, doesn’t have the answer to everything.  Many phenomena are simply left to other disciplines, from psychology to physics, or left without an academic theory at all.  Abundance, like growth itself, is a force that is changing our world in ways that we experience every day, whether we have an equation to describe it or not.

 

The reference to Anderson’s book, is:

Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail. New York: Hyperion, 2006.

Milton Friedman, Freedom’s Friend, RIP

 

A week or so ago my mother and I were sharing our disappointment at the firing of Donald Rumsfeld, who we both thought was a good man.  She told me that she had thought he would have made a good President.  I told her that she was in good company, because in his memoirs, Milton Friedman had expressed the same thought (p. 391).

We were in very good company while Milton Friedman was with us, and I feel a sense of loss, both personally, and for the broader world. 

By chance, I sat behind Milton Friedman, and his wife and son, at the Rockefeller Chapel memorial service to honor Milton Friedman’s good friend George Stigler.  I can’t remember if Friedman spoke it at the service, or wrote it later, but I remember him saying (or writing) that the world was a darker place without Stigler in it. 

And it is darker yet, without Friedman in it.  (It is reported that he died of heart failure sometime early this morning at the age of 94.)

My first memory of meeting Milton Friedman was in the early 1970s at Wabash College.  My Wabash professor, Ben Rogge, was a friend of Friedman’s.  They attended Mount Pelerin Society meetings together, and Rogge, along with his senior colleague John van Sickle, had invited Friedman to deliver a series of lectures at Wabash College, that became the basis of what remains Friedman’s meatiest defense of freedom:  Capitalism and Freedom.  (Free to Choose is better known, broader, and important, but Capitalism and Freedom is more densely packed with stimulating argument, and provocative new ideas.)

The members of the small, libertarian Van Sickle Club were gathered around Friedman in a lounge at Wabash, and I remember Rogge asking Friedman:  ‘If there was a button sitting in front of you, that would instantly abolish the Food and Drug Administration, would you push it?’  I remember Friedman smiling his incredibly delighted smile, and saying simply, with gusto:  "yes!"

I remember attending some meetings at the University of Chicago, I think the first History of Economics Society meetings, with Rogge in attendance.  (This was in my first couple of years as a Chicago graduate student, when I was mainly doing philosophy.)  Stigler invited Rogge up for a drink, and Rogge said said ‘sure’ as long as Diamond could come along.  (E.G. West, the Adam Smith biographer, was also there, I think at Rogge’s behest.)  The apartment had been Milton Friedman’s for many years.  In fact I think he had built the several story apartment building, because he wanted convenient, comfortable living quarters close to his Chicago office.  Friedman’s apartment occupied the top floor, and I vaguely recall, afforded a nice view of the campus. 

I lived for a year at International House, next to the Friedman apartment building.  I remember on Sunday morning’s seeing Friedman dash into International House to buy his copy of the Sunday New York Times.  ("Dash" is too strong, but he certainly moved with more vigor than I ever have on Sunday mornings.)

When Friedman left Chicago for the Hoover Institute in California, he sold, or sublet his apartment to Stigler, who apparently used it on evenings when he did not want to drive out to his modest home in the Chicago suburb of Flossmoor.

I was stunned to be in the presence of Stigler in Milton Friedman’s former abode.  (I seem to remember E.G. West seeming almost equally overwhelmed.)  I remember much of the time being spent with Stigler trying to convince Rogge to join him for golf the following day.  Rogge demurred because he was wanting to see, for the first time, I think, a newly born grandchild in the Chicago area.  (Family was extremely important to Rogge, both in theory, and in practice.)

I also remember Stigler asking Rogge about Rogge’s having convinced Friedman to give a speech at a fund-raiser at Wabash.  Stigler said something to the effect that this was the level of favor that he could not ask often of Friedman, and did the cause really justify it.  (I think one of Stigler’s sons had been a Wabash student while Rogge was Dean of Students at Wabash.)  Rogge seemed to appreciate Stigler’s point, but seemed to believe that solidifying Wabash’s endowment was a worthy enough cause.

(This, by the way, is ironic, since Rogge agreed with Adam Smith that endowments were apt to be used for purposes different from the donor’s intent.  In the founding of Liberty Fund, Rogge had tried to persuade Pierre Goodrich to have the Fund spend all of its funds in some modestly finite number of years.)

After I gradually made the switch from philosophy to economics, at Chicago, I got to know Stigler fairly well, but unfortunately did not know Friedman, personally, as well.

I remember attending a reception at Chicago in honor of Friedman’s winning the Nobel Prize in 1976.  (It was at that reception, that I first struck up a conversation with my good friend Luis Locay.)

I registered for Milton Friedman’s price theory class the final time he taught it, I think.  It was in a large, dark tiered classroom.  At the beginning of every class, Friedman would almost bounce into the classroom, bursting with pent-up energy.  I do not smile easily, or often, but I always smiled when I saw Friedman.  There was so much good-will, joy in life, enthusiasm for ideas. 

During one of these entrances, I noticed that Friedman, well into his 60s, was wearing the counter-culture-popular ‘earth shoes’; apparently he was out-front in footwear, as well as ideas.

One characteristic that came through in class, as well as in his public debates and interviews, was that he was focused on the ideas and not the personalities expressing them.  I remember seeing Friedman debating some union official on television.  He talked at one point about how he and the official had had to work hard in their youth.  Friedman seemed to like the union official; he just disagreed with some of his ideas, and wanted the union official and everyone else, to understand why.  By the end of the "debate", the union official had a warm, amused, expression on his face.

I remember once Friedman saying that more of us should speak out more often on more topics; that the bad consequences to us weren’t as bad as we supposed.  Probably he was right; though he had a lot working in his favor—his quick-wittedness, his good will, his sense of humor, and probably his being so short in physical stature—it was probably hard for anyone to feel threatened by him, so they were more apt to let down their guard and listen to what he had to say.

One of the unfair hardships of some of Friedman’s years at Chicago, was the constant harassment from a group of Marxist students called, I think, the Spartacus Youth League.  Whenever Friedman was scheduled to speak, they would disrupt the event, and try to prevent his speaking.

So when it was time to tape the discussion half-hours of each hour episode of the original "Free to Choose" series, the discussions were scheduled as invitation-only.  I was in the audience for two or three of the discussions.  (They were fine, but personally, I would have preferred another half hour of pure Friedman.)

 

As a poor graduate student, I counted myself extremely lucky to find an auto-repairman who was a wizard at finding creative ways to keep old cars running, at low repair cost.  He was a man of few words, put he kept the words he gave.

I ran into him and his wife in a little Lebanese restaurant that was run out of the secondary student union just down from I-House.  He invited me to sit with them, which I did.  I remember him telling me that they were gypsies, and him mentioning that people sometimes had the wrong idea about gypsies.  He told me that he had been rais
ed never to go into debt.  He told me how cheap White Castle hamburgers used to be.  When I told him that I was studying economics, he surprised me by saying that Milton Friedman had been a customer of his, and that he really liked Milton Friedman.

This gypsy was a simple, decent, hard-working fellow.  I don’t know, but I strongly guess that Friedman saw the good in this fellow, and treasured what he saw.  And the gypsy liked Milton Friedman back.

 

Whenever I saw Friedman interviewed on television, or read one of his letters, or op-ed pieces, in the Wall Street Journal, I would feel a bit more optimistic about freedom, and life.  A lot of people give up, at some point, but Friedman never did—he just kept on observing, and thinking, and speaking.  The last time I had any interaction with him was at the meetings of the Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) on April 4, 2005.  He was hooked up with the conference via video camera from an office in California.  He gave a brief presentation, and then spent quite some time answering questions.  (I recorded some of these in grainy, small video clips that can be viewed on my web site, or viewed on the web site of the APEE.)

I asked him a question about whether he agreed with Stigler in Stigler’s memoirs that Schumpeter had something important to say about competition.  I wasn’t as impressed by his answer to this question, as I was to some of his other answers.

I think that Schumpeter may be remembered as a crucial economist for our understanding of the process of capitalism:  innovative new products through creative destruction.  But if capitalist innovation prospers, part of the credit will belong to Milton Friedman.  

Friedman and Stigler were led into economics in part because of the challenge to capitalism posed by the Great Depression.  If depressions of that magnitude were an essential part of what capitalism was about, then a lot of people would prefer to have nothing to do with capitalism.  Schumpeter’s response basically was to say that every once in awhile, really bad depressions will happen as part of the process of capitalism, and we just have to suck it up, and live through them. 

One of Milton Friedman’s major contributions to economics, was to show that ill-advised government policies, such as a contraction of the money supply, were responsible for making the depression much deeper, and much longer than it needed to have been.  (See, e.g,  A Monetary History of the United States.)

In other words, he showed that Great Depressions are not an inescapable price we must pay if we choose to embrace the economic freedom, and the creative destruction, of capitalism.

 

When Friedman cleaned out his Chicago office to head for California, he left in the hallway for scavenging, extra copies of some of his books, and offprints of articles various academics had sent him.  So I have a Spanish copy of Capitalism and Freedom (even though I don’t read Spanish), and several offprints of articles from distinguished economists who sent "best wishes" to "Milton." 

After the office was cleared out, I remember sticking my head in, and looking around the empty office, one final time, for sentiment’s sake.  I was stunned to see a bright red, white and blue silk banner left hanging on the wall.  It was festooned with American flags, and said, in large letters:  "Buy American!" 

I felt anxious and confused:  was one of my heroes inconsistent on such a basic issue?  So I entered the office, and went over to the banner, and examined it more carefully.  It was then that I noticed, in small letters at the bottom of the banner:  "Made in Japan".

 

Some book references relevant to the discussion above:

Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, Nber Studies in Business Cycles. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Friedman, Milton, and Rose D. Friedman. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1980.

Stigler, George J. Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1988.

West, E. G. Adam Smith: The Man and His Works: Arlington House, 1969.

 

 In vino veritas.  Photo from Tio Pepe Bodega, Jerez, Spain.  Photographer:  Dagny Diamond.

 

Continue reading “Milton Friedman, Freedom’s Friend, RIP”

Rosen’s Superstars Versus the Long Tail

One of Sherwin Rosen’s most important articles is "The Economics of Superstars" in which he argues that if a superstar’s performance is even slightly better than the next best performer’s, if the performance can be cheaply reproduced (as with radio, CDs, etc.) then a small premium multiplied thousands of times, might result in huge differences in earnings.

This argument works, so long as most of us are interested in the same sort of performance, and are willing to pay some small premium for the best performer of it.  But what if we care as much about the content of the performance as the quality of the performance?  (In other words, we care as much about what is done, as we care about how well it is done.) 

The new book The Long Tail can be taken to imply that there are many niches, and that the days of the "superstar" are over (or at least that in the future, the compensation of the superstars will not be quite so super).  If this argument works, and I think it does, then it implies that the new technologies will serve consumers by better matching consumer preferences with the services provided, and also implies that a more diverse group of suppliers (performers) will be able to sustain themselves.

More speculatively, it seems as though it might imply greater equality in the labor market.  If this last is true, it goes against most accounts of the effects of recent high technology on the labor market.

 

The reference to the Rosen article is:

Rosen, Sherwin.  "The Economics of Superstars."  American Economic Review 71, no. 5 (Dec. 1981): 845-58.

 

The reference to The Long Tail is:

Anderson, Chris.  The Long Tail.  New York:  Hyperion, 2006.