Economics

The Register has an interesting article on the underlying economics of big tech. The Amazons and Googles of the world have grown huge by offering “free” products like Alexa and Gmail. As we all know by now, if it’s free, you are the product. Has this model run out of steam at huge scale? These huge free services are expensive to run. The most recent results from Amazon show how difficult it can be to make money on a free service.

An interesting casualty of the pandemic supply chain issues is the availability of trained dogs for bomb-sniffing. I would have thought that we would raise our own dogs for this but only 7% are from the US and we have a chronic shortage. The US Government pays about $8k for a “green” dog (a year old dog that has basic assistance dog training but isn’t specialized yet) This seems like a really good business opportunity for someone who likes dogs and can do basic training.

Back in the day, I wanted to be an economics professor. The subject is interesting and varied. One thing that economics has at it’s core is the study of what people do in the face of scarcity. What decisions do they make? How do they react when something they need suddenly becomes more scarce? What are universities going to do in the face of a scarcity of college-age students in the next few years?

The Economist has brought back the Big Mac Index. It’s a fun way to understand relative values of currencies with everyone’s favorite burger (although it’s honestly been years since I’ve had one). It looks like a great time to go to the Czech Republic for vacation. The raw data and code behind how the index is calculated is available for download. They also provide instructions to reproduce it from the data which is nice.