Home » Posts tagged 'The Daily Bell' (Page 2)
Tag Archives: The Daily Bell
Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance.
This study, published in May, shows what happens to local politics when local newspapers close their doors.
In short, it’s not good. But that doesn’t mean we need to preserve the relics of a bygone era. When a changing market unearths negative results, that is a golden opportunity for an innovative entrepreneur to fill the void.
And actually, the story starts when online job listings and classifieds became popular. This innovation provided locals with a better alternative to the print versions. But in the process, it took a big chunk of local newspapers’ revenue.
Craigslist was the catalyst to newspapers’ decline. But I’ll explain at the end about a tool I think could help replace local newspapers.
1. Craigslist is the Harbinger of the Local News Apocalypse.
The study found that when Craiglist was introduced to a new location, local newspapers were 10% more likely to fail.
The growing popularity of Craigslist in the 2000s came at a cost to traditional newspaper outlets, which largely rely on revenue from advertisement sales. Kroft and Pope (2014), for example, show that Craigslist had a large impact on job advertising in local newspapers, as employers were increasingly using online forums like Craigslist to advertise their job openings. Gurun and Butler (2012) provide evidence that Craigslist entry in Pittsburgh and St. Louis significantly eroded advertisement sales for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and St. Louis-Post Dispatch, causing those papers to provide more favorably slanted coverage to local corporations that purchased advertisements in those newspapers.
2. When Newspapers Close, Local Government Efficiency Deteriorates.
After local papers shut down, town and county workers’ wages increased compared to local private sector employees. On average this led to a 1.3% increase in the government wage ratio to other county employees.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
You Hate the State, But Do You Hate Politics? How Self Deception and Coalitions Affect Society
You Hate the State, But Do You Hate Politics? How Self Deception and Coalitions Affect Society
It takes no particular sophistication to see how cruel our ancestors were. But it takesremarkable insight to see such cruelty hidden in plain sight today.
Libertarians are fairly good at seeing cruelty others miss. We see taxation as theft, war as murder and citizenship as slavery. We aren’t naïve enough to think everything will be fine if we have a good president at the helm.
But we make a huge, comparable mistake. We assume the market is a great restraining force against fraud and deception. Now it is true that certain forms of deception are checked by the market. But this is not true of many other forms of deception. There is a real sense in which the market values the ability to deceive. Libertarians are blind to this, at their own peril.
Politics in Business
When I dropped out of college and started working, I couldn’t help seeing that deception is the norm, even in private organizations. There was so much that could have beendone so much better, but wasn’t being done because of political reasons. In my experience, organizations reward prudent predation. What is going on?
Economist Robin Hanson answers such puzzles more satisfactorily than anybody else.In any large organization, there are coalitions which compete for limited resources. Coalition politics is vicious, and a major reason why firms are inefficient.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How Puerto Rico Could Turn Disaster into a Decentralized Paradise
How Puerto Rico Could Turn Disaster into a Decentralized Paradise
Many Puerto Ricans are still without power from the large-scale grid failure after Hurricane Maria last fall. Some are not expected to be reconnected to the grid until April or May.
Community Solutions
One of those communities took matters into its own hands and set the local school up with solar panels. Plans to set up rainwater collection and filtration are also in the works. This would make the school entirely off-grid, and a perfect community shelter in the event of other natural disasters.
The Daily Bell recently published an article called 7 Reasons to Shut Down Public Schools Immediately and Permanently. Praising an off-grid public school seems like a contradiction.
But Puerto Rico announced plans to introduce a school voucher program so that students could take a portion of a school’s funding with them and apply it towards another public or private school. Perhaps a school which is off the grid and teaches kids about solar and rainwater systems will flourish. Competition always helps to improve things.
This doesn’t come close to solving all the current problems with mainstream schooling. But the off the grid school couple with school choice can be seen as a decentralization of government, with the community more in control. And that seems like a step in the right direction.
Individual Solutions
Puerto Rican companies in the solar industry had a hard time convincing consumers of the need for solar energy and storage before Hurricane Maria. But now, everyone understands the value of being off the grid. It means you don’t sit around waiting and hoping for the government to come save you. You are in control of your own energy production and use.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Where the Government Fear-Porn Propaganda Industry is Headed
Where the Government Fear-Porn Propaganda Industry is Headed
Killer robots are the latest terror. But there are so many takes on it! It’s like Josef Goebbels’ dream to have so much material to work with. All the “possibilities” and “predictions” just make you want to curl up in a ball and let the government handle everything!
The spokesman for Stop Killer Robots campaign then warned the consequences of deadly tech winding up in the wrong hands would lead to catastrophic consequences.
He said: “Authoritarian dictators getting a hold of these, who won’t be held back by their soldiers not wanting to kill the population.”
…
“This capability is out there – scaling it up to swarms of drones doesn’t need any huge inventive step, it’s just a question of resources, time, and scale.
“I think that’s an absolute certainty that we should worry about.”
Hmm… okay? Doesn’t seem like dictators have had too many problems in the past getting their soldiers to kill the population. Automating death and destruction is certainly a scary thought though. World War One was a testament to the damage that soldiers can do with automatic guns, tanks, and chemical weapons. 20 million military and civilians died.
And yet, in the same time frame, the Spanish Flu swept across the globe killing at least 20 million people. Some estimates suggest upwards of 50 million deaths caused by the virus.
And the government likes to use fear of global pandemics in their propaganda too. That is why they passed a regulation that allows the Centers for Disease Control to detain indefinitely anyone suspected of carrying an infectious disease. That was the big payoff for all the fears of Ebola, Triple E, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Sars, Zika and so on.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Panic! Like It’s 1837
Panic! Like It’s 1837
Things culminated to that point after years of borrowing the paper currency to expand west, buy land, and build infrastructure. As silver came in from Mexico, banks lent out five times the amount of their deposits–fractional reserve banking.
At the same time, the value of silver was falling because its supply was increasing in America. Great Britain, which had been lending much of the money, was less interested in silver because they could pay for trade with China in opium. So even though Britain had a year earlier begun demanding payment in specie, the abundant silver in America did not hold the same weight, so to speak, it had previously.
Now, reflect on this for a second. The USA was depending on loans from a country that they had successfully revolted and seceded from fewer than 50 years earlier. Britain had also provoked The War of 1812 just 25 years earlier when they wouldn’t stop attacking American ships. But somehow it still seemed like a good idea to depend on British banks to form the foundation of American development.
So at the same time when American banks had to backstep their risky practices, Britain also just so happened to need 25% less cotton, which was the foundation of the American economy. This only exacerbated the trade deficit.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
