The problem with Movember

At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I haven't donated to anyone's Movember campaign this year, and I'm not sure that I will. I'm blaming it on the paradox of choice.

Movember, for anyone out of the loop, is a charitable campaign where men grow a moustache in November to raise money to fight prostate cancer. It's a worthy cause, though I fear that Movember might fall victim to its own success.

New books shouldn't be rare

On Tuesday, Johanna Skibsrud won the Giller Prize, one of the top literary awards in Canada, for her book The Sentimentalists. But if you try to find a copy of her book at your local bookstore, you'll likely have failed.

It turns out that the book is published by a small boutique outfit in Kentville, Nova Scotia, and they are unable to meet the new-found demand for Skibsrud's book in a timely manner. At first, I became angry when I read about this in the Toronto Star. It appeared that the publisher was attributing his slow production to being a small business, "weaving themselves into the life of a community, unlike the Wal-Marts of the world, merely in search of a profit." That spin irked me, because not being able to come anywhere close to meeting demand is a sign of incompetence, rather than a necessary outcome of running a small business. Lots of small businesses are competent enough to meet customer demand.

Can microcredit work in the first world?

Microcredit is extremely helpful in poor, third-world environments, but can it work in the first world?

Microcredit is the practice of giving small loans to entrepreneurs who wouldn't otherwise have access to credit. Usually, people apply for loans in groups, where some group members don't receive their funding until others have paid theirs back. This lessens the risk of default because people experience peer pressure to repay their loans, and because applicants will tend to be more responsible since people won't want to form a group with someone who is unlikely to repay their loan.

Future of journalism: interviewing by proxy?

When I started this blog, I intended it to be about both economics and journalism. However, the journalism focus slipped through the cracks, and this blog has evolved into, more or less, a behavioural economics blog. That being said, this post is solely about journalism.

When journalists hold meetings and bring in guest speakers, one of the most popular topics is "the future of journalism." I hate this topic. To me, it implies that journalism as it is can't survive without a major change, that newspapers will be extinct by the end of the year if they don't completely change what they're doing. The death of print journalism, I think, is over-hyped. Surely the Globe and Mail wouldn't make an 18-year, $1.7 billion commitment to their newly-redesigned product if they thought print journalism was on its way out.

But that doesn't stop all the prognosticating by media types about what they think the future of journalism will look like. So here's my stab at it: interviewing by proxy.

I (happily) let Rogers manipulate my incentives

I received an unsolicited call from Rogers on Saturday. I already have TV, phone and internet service from them, and they were offering me an additional 10% off each service. The only catch was that if I cancelled any of these services within two years, I would be charged a cancellation fee equal to the discount I received on that service, up to a maximum of $100.

At first, I was skeptical. Rogers already had me as a customer. I wasn't threatening to switch to a competitor. Why would they offer me a discount when I was presumably happy and willing to pay the price they were already charging me? I asked the salesman this question, and he gave me some textbook line that the discount is because I subscribe to multiple services.

Harry Potternomics

I like movies based on reality (an aside: I wonder if this is typical of economists?). I never liked Star Wars, am not into the whole vampire trend that seems to have captivated Hollywood, and can't be bothered to read any of the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter books. I did see one of the Harry Potter movies, but only because a girl I was interested in wanted to see it.

Although I didn't appreciate the movie at the time, I'm now wondering if the Harry Potter series might be worth a read. Eric Gouvin, a law prof in New England, has published what sounds like a fascinating article about the parallels and differences between the banking system in Harry Potter and the banking system in the real world. According to a description of Gouvin's report, "[W]izards do not manage their money supply the way Muggles do by using the slight of hand of fractional reserve banking to create money out of thin air. Instead, the money supply in the wizard world seems stagnant, creating social problems that emphasize disparities in wealth."

I never knew that Harry Potter was so deep. The article is published as a chapter in The Law and Harry Potter — too bad it's not available at my local library.