Comments by bampbs

Ultimately, what matters is that mobility in the US is less than it was. The European situation merely adds insult to injury.

Sometimes Cowen is an almost abject apologist for the degeneration of capitalism we've seen over the last 30 years.

This is great. The more options for people with ideas, the better. Down with the Gatekeepers!

Not Napster, Netflix.

If you think about it, isn't it amazing that anyone at all pays when, if we're to believe the media companies, everyone could have everything for free?

Perhaps there is an ethical aspect to economics, and people will pay a reasonable price even if they don't have to. An interesting question is whether that reasonableness would be reciprocated by the media companies in the complete absence of piracy. I think we all remember the answer to that question for the music industry from the days before Napster. Indeed, the issue for them is not the loss of revenue due to piracy, but the loss of monopoly control. Do we want them to regain that so they can abuse it again?

Unless the ECB acts as lender of last resort, I don't see a way out of the mess. I don't know whether Merkel is crazy, or hoping to stall through the next German elections.

Are you certain that Portugal will not benefit from leaving the Euro ? The misery is in place now in large part because of having joined the Euro in the first place. The Escudo would have made it harder for the government to borrow too much, and the freedom to devalue would have saved you from the Germans' austerity fetish.

Paddy Power has increased Obama's chance of winning to 60%

Come off it - did the rumor about McCain's having a Black child appear by accident in South Carolina ?

I can't recall ever voting *for* anyone as much as against his opponent.

We can assume that the fees paid by users were almost entirely to facilitate piracy, but the advertising revenue was not.

Legal online music is pretty cheap. Someone who will not pay 99 cents for a song isn't going to pay, period.

The answer to music piracy is iTunes or Rhapsody. Since you can watch all the movies you want for $7.99 a month with Napster, I suspect that you are already capturing the people who are willing to pay. My guess is that if you eliminated all internet piracy tomorrow, revenues would go up very little.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". A lovely sentiment that often works in families.

But a nation ? It's hard to believe what some people will believe. No implementation can bring about an impossibility.

Another advantage of a small transaction tax is that a great deal of computer trading would become unprofitable. Anything to encourage investment banks to stop being hedge funds and go back to investment banking would be a good thing.

Doesn't this exchange belong under a different comment I made about slowing hot money with a transaction tax ?

http://www.economist.com/comment/1200960#comment-1200960

Doesn't this exchange belong under a different comment I made about slowing hot money with a transaction tax ?

http://www.economist.com/comment/1200960#comment-1200960

Forgive me, RR; in 1999, I was one of those selling them to you.

When it comes to an increase in stability, I fear that anything less than the shackles we had in place on finance from the '30s until the '80s will be a fool's errand.

What I really had in mind was a way for developing nations to protect themselves from foreign hot money.

Anyone who imagines that every pirated file equals a lost sale has a lot to learn about the effect of price on demand.

This is just the beginning of an uncontrollable deluge of lethal bioengineering. The Big-Brained Ape looks to be an evolutionary dead end. For at least 400 years, our cleverness has been outrunning our sense, and looks to have reached the finish line.

Sherman ought to have burned all of South Carolina as thoroughly as he did Columbia, left no stone upon another, and salted the earth. It ought to have been returned to wilderness, and kept that way in perpetuity.

I say this even though one of the great loves of my life was from Charleston. Sometimes one must make sacrifices for the good of one's country.

I'm referring to people who most certainly believe that Jesus existed, and who believe that he is God.

I've read a great deal about the historical Jesus. There isn't much evidence, almost all of it is in the Gospels, and they are contradictory. But we are dealing with religion, not history.

Any chance that the ECB will be a normal central bank once it grows up ?

Bagehot must be laughing.

Newt deserves the chance to destroy the Yahoo GOP he created in 1995.

I was glad when the Republicans won the House and Senate in 1994, but what a damned fool I was. I never dreamt that Gingrich and the boys would make such jackasses of themselves once they were in power.

I can't wait for the prices of Port and Madeira to plummet.