Early-century performance reviews

I'm sure that if they made these kinds of comments in today's politically correct world it would be grounds for a lawsuit in many places...


http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/01/performance_reviews

Sales - Music Industry

the graph below has the total sales of the music industry. Interesting how turnover peaked in 2000 and has been going down since then. Even the introduction of digital media hasn't really helped.

No wonder that with artists demanding a bigger slice of profits and internet downloading being so easy to do, their business model is in serious need of a change.

100 Years of the American Economic Review: The Top 20 Articles

Via Brad DeLong's blog, here are the top 20 articles in the AER's first 100 years.

I've read about 6-7 of them, but the one I often use on my research is the Grossman and Stiglitz's one:

Grossman, Sanford J., and Joseph E. Stiglitz. 1980. “On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets.” American Economic Review, 70(3): 393–408.

The Importance of Being Honest

This is a great article by E. Derman and Paul Wilmott on  how we should be careful with our models. Here are their suggestions at the end,

• I will remember that I didn't make the world and that it doesn't satisfy my equations.
• Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics.
• I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so. Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights.
• I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension. 

It is so easy to get lost in the mathematics of models that we often see papers completely out of touch with reality...