Via Jonathan Portes (“Not the Treasury View”), here’s NIESR’s latest chart showing – for the UK – the path of recession and recovery in various previous downturns:
The number of dips is not really an issue when you’re flat-lining
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Author Archives: Frederick Guy
Why I left America
It’s really depressing to be a pedestrian in an American city.
I am reminded by Streetsblog’s contest to find the Worst Intersection in America. Now they’ve announced the winner. Well done, Omaha!
Eric Hobsbawm – late interview
When I was first at Birkbeck, this guy was still a regular in the staff canteen – so I must be getting on a bit myself! The interviewer is the current Master of Birkbeck, David Latchman. The revelation that several of Hobsbawm’s best books were essentially his Birkbeck lecture notes does raise the bar for the rest of us, just a bit.
A paper on parking and walkable retail
Here’s my recent working paper Small, local and cheap? Walkable and car-oriented retail in competition. Parts are a bit technical but most of it is policy and, I’d like to think, compulsively readable.
Guerilla Bench: Beziehungskiste
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Take a seat, and watch.
Enjoying the decadence of the intellectual property imperium
US phone companies may now make it a crime to unlock the hardware you bought.
A shopping basket full of patent trolls
Here’s the case of a troll that tried to get royalties from all on-line retailers for the Shopping Cart. Actually sued, and for some time won, for a percentage on all sales passing through those carts – that has to be huge money.
Now this particular troll has lost a big case, invalidating its previous big wins. Any guesses how much was consumed in legal bills and related costs for its various lawsuits, before the dust settled?
Software patents have two functions: they allow big businesses (the ones with patent portfolios, and pockets deep enough to retain intellectual property lawyers as needed) to increase their market power at the expense of small operators who lack those resources; and they provide a living for pure rent seeking patent trolls, and of course the IP lawyers on all sides of these disputes. Big business tends not to like the second function of software patents, but values the first. For the rest of us, they’re both dead losses.
Insourcing?
James Fallows, in The Atlantic, reminds us that one of the problems with Boeing’s Dreamliner has been excessive outsourcing. And he directs us to Charles Fishman‘s story, in the same publication, about some insourcing in General Electric’s household appliance manufacturing.
Fishman’s story is really two stories.
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Michigan needs more parking!
See civil society mobilize to reinvigorate Detroit, in what could be a model for derelict, low-density post-industrial wastes everywhere. Join the campaign on Facebook site.
Karl Marx is dead, really??
Robert Waldman says Theda Scocpal says Marx is dead, on the grounds that the US Republican party didn’t follow big business’s support for [carbon] Cap and Trade legislation in 2007. His post is both interesting and short, so I’ll reproduce it in full:
BP stands first for Brian Plumer then for British Petroleum — I’m pretty sure DuPont is the firm and not Pierre “Pete”. TS is Theda Scocpal. When I knew her (OK when I took freshman physics from her husband Bill) she was one of the few Marxists at Harvard (I think the only one in the Sociology department).
BP: So around 2007, Republicans were becoming more skeptical of climate policy. Yet the main climate strategy in D.C. was to craft a complex cap-and-trade bill amenable to businesses like BP and DuPont in the hopes that those companies would bring in Republican votes.
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Frederick Guy 