Author Archives: Matthew Moreno

I thought it would be appropriate to open up the semester with a gem from my summer reading: the MONIAC Computer. I discovered it in Tim Hartford’s The Undercover Economist. It’s an analog macro-economic simulator developed in the late 1940’s by Bill Phillips, who at the time studied at the London School of Economics. Digital computers, which readily “crunch” numerical simulations for us today, were in their infancy at the time. So, Bill Phillips used a carefully arranged series of tanks and tubes through which moved an actual, physical fluid to simulate the flow of money in the UK economy. The Wikipedia Continue reading A Summertime Gem to Start the Semester→

The past few weeks, I’ve been looking at the genesis of “podcasting” through an economic lens. This week, I’m turning to look at the current state of the podcast market. At a first glance, the podcast industry seems to follow the “public good” paradigm. Economists define a public good as “A product that one individual can consume without reducing its availability to another individual and from which no one is excluded.”. Although there is some marginal cost associated with digitally distributing the sound files to a listener, this cost is very small. Except for the largest operations (Ira Glass claimed in 2011 that Continue reading Podcasting: An Emerging Industry? (Part 5)→

Three weeks ago I outlined the history of the podcast. I noticed that previous attempts to launch podcast-like services as organized business ventures had failed. Podcasting only took on its modern form around 2005, when it launched as an open-source method of embedding audio files in RSS feeds. The first user-side podcast service was the personal project of an ex-MTV host. These observations raise the question: why did podcasting emerge outside of the corporate sphere? Two weeks ago, I addressed this question by considering podcasting as a “disruptive technology.” This week, I’ll look at the early days of podcasting in Continue reading Podcasting: An Emerging Industry? (Part 4)→

Last week I outlined the history of the podcast. I noticed that previous attempts to launch podcast-like services as organized business ventures had failed. Podcasting only took on its modern form around 2005, when it launched as an open-source method of embedding audio files in RSS feeds. The first user-side podcast service was the personal project of an ex-MTV host. These observations raise the question: why did podcasting emerge outside of the corporate sphere? This week we’ll investigate the emergence of podcasting by looking at it as a disruptive technology. What is a disruptive technology? NPR recently interviewed Ryan Knutson, Continue reading Podcasting: An Emerging Industry? (Part 3)→

The (brief) history of how podcasting came to somewhat surprised me as I was researching this article. The medium has existed through all of my adult and adult-ish life. I had always assumed that it was some corporate project (maybe of Apple?) that others jumped in on it. It turns out, this is not the case at all. In fact, almost the exact opposite occurred. The idea of serialized audio predates the advent of mainstream digital personal audio devices. NPR’s Planet Money ran an episode about a guy who claimed to have patented the concept. He ran a company called Personal Audio that delivered magazine articles read aloud to subscribers via cassette tape. Continue reading Podcasting: An Emerging Industry? (Part 2)→

I’m sure many Sound Economics readers regularly use podcasts to get econ-related news and discussion. Personally, I regularly tune in to APM’s Marketplace, NPR’s Planet Money, and and WBUR’s Here and Now. Although podcasts are likely not particularly obscure among our audience, they do not register much with the vast majority of the American public: just 29 percent of Americans had ever listened to a podcast. In fact, the medium is so niche that when This American Life released its podcast-only spin-off show Serial, it provided a special YouTube instructional video on how to use it. It so happens that that project, Serial, quickly became Continue reading Podcasting: An Emerging Industry? (Part 1)→

At first blush, Jeopardy and spreadsheets might seem like they don’t have a lot in common. However, together they illustrate the quantum leap economic automation is poised to take. NPR’s Planet Money recently ran a great episode on the genesis of computer spreadsheets. In a nutshell, before computer spreadsheets accounting clerks kept giant paper spreadsheets by hand. This was a laborious, error-prone system. Once computer spreadsheets arrived on the market, those clerical positions began to evaporate. However, non-clerical accounting positions expanded rapidly. The computer spreadsheet also allowed the financial sector to grow rapidly. So there was a loss of jobs due to automation, Continue reading Spreadsheets, Jeopardy, and Automation→

I gave blood in the campus blood drive yesterday. On my way to the blood mobile, I was wondering (in a slightly apprehensive state) why am I doing this? What is my real incentive for going through with such an inconvenient and uncomfortable hassle? That question inspired me to look into these two Freakonomics articles (link 1, link 2) that investigate exactly that question. I was interested to find that Chinese citizens are paid, about $12 a go, for their donations. Interestingly, there are conflicting findings about the effect of incentives on US blood donations. An older study actually indicated Continue reading “A Pint for a Pint”→

Although you might be the only person you’re thinking about when you buy bubblebath online with two day delivery from Amazon, it turns out that the speedy and time-guaranteed delivery of your soap is part of a pervasive  trend that’s having huge effects on the global economy. Last week, I stumbled upon two stories that really show how important the just-in-time delivery paradigm has become. The first, from NPR’s Planet Money, the supply chain that perishable roses follow to get from halfway across the world, where it’s the growing season, to flower shops in anticipation of Valentine’s day. For just this one day, prices can spike to Continue reading Two Stories about Just-In-Time Delivery… from Last Week→

I’ve written a few posts over the past year about humor in economics. Humor in the field, it seems sometimes, is a desert. Not necessarily for its desolation, but for its dryness. However, this gem from APM’s Marketplace caught my eye for its extreme lack of moisture. A paper entitled “A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors” was presented at a recent American Economics Association in Boston. Its main finding:    We believe this paper is the first written by four economists who share a surname. From the conclusion section,   Future breakthroughs on this topic should be possible. We believe much could be Continue reading Some Arid Economic Humor→