Hundred Pockets

After reading The Million’s wonderful list of the best novels of the millennium so far (thank-you Tyler), I felt frankly rather shamed at not having read half of them. My self-image as a cultured human being under serious threat, I duly pitched down to Waterstone’s after work to buy Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.

The thing is, The Corrections is a fairly hefty book – and my bag’s already filled with my none-too-light laptop. I’m dreading the Tube ride home with all this weight. But as I’m entering the PIN number for my debit card at the Waterstone’s counter, it suddenly occurs to me – I can buy the book on my iPhone. It will be cheaper than the physical book. It will weigh nothing whatsoever. What on earth am I doing buying a physical lump of pages?

As this thought staggered into my brain, I yanked my card out of the chip-and-pin device, mumbled ‘Oh, wait, sorry, I’ve just remembered, I don’t need this book’ (while the checkout guy looked at me like I was mentally disturbed), and meekly replaced the book on the shelf.

Standing outside Waterstone’s, I had The Corrections on my phone inside of five minutes. And I can’t help feeling that this moment – yanking my card out the chip-and-pin – has shifted something in my life irrevocably.

You see, I love books. Like adore them. My reading habits as a child were ferocious, and when I got a job in Waterstone’s as a teenager, it was like the Mother Ship was calling me home. Staff got a 30% discount on books, and I must have spent around half my wages in the store (employing a compulsive reader as a bookseller is pretty much an investment). It’s like being paid to constantly browse the shelves. My personal library will not fit in my London flat – the majority of my overstuffed bookshelves remain at my parents’ house, waiting to rejoin their kin when I can afford a bigger place.

Bookshops feel like home to me, and always have. When I arrive in a strange city, if I’m feeling a bit off-balance in that culture shock sort of way, I’ll find a bookshop, and spend an hour or two browsing. Never fails to calm my nerves.

And yet. Reading books on my phone is nothing short of wonderful. The books are always with me (a benefit I cannot overstate), they’re weightless, and – best of all – I can read while I’m walking, even when it’s dark. That probably sounds slightly unhinged, but I’ve always been a read-and-walk-er (a habit which will doubtless kill me one day when I step into traffic). Time spent walking from one place to another has always seemed like dead time – all that spare brain capacity, while your mind is basically going ‘left-leg-right-leg-repeat’… A backlit it screen is a technological quantum leap for read-and-walk-ers everywhere.  An advance as profound as sliced bread, or refrigerated food – simple, brilliant, and life-changing.

So as of now, I’m an e-reader. I’m sure I’ll still buy physical books when, you know, I want the pictures. Or I’m going somewhere without electricity. Or they’re a present. But for my own day to day reading (and walking) – the e-book is the future.  Vive la revolution…

While I’m doing musical/economic mash-ups (see previous post), let me re-post an old favourite: Psikotic’s rap about the Economist, which you can hear here.

He reads the Economist and is a cautious optimist,

Important event, yeah, they’re on top of this,

Almost everywhere that matters, they got a journalist,

Local and in depth at a flick of the wrist,

Supplemented with almost too many graphs

Of output, opinion, and number of staff,

Or number of terrorist insurgent attacks

In Iraq, Afghanistan, compare and contrast…

I think I first read about this here.

Don’t some taxes just make you want to… sing? Apparently in Belize they do. When the government introduced a sales tax (GST) in 2007, they wanted to explain the tax to their people. Should they make a leaflet? Put up posters?

No – much better. They created a song. (Click the link and scroll down for the music video.)

GST! Fulfill yu duty

GST! Fi yu and fi me

GST! We building we country

We on the road to prosperity

This song is a work of godlike genius. All must see it.

… for the week without posts. A writing deadline that got way out of hand…

Felix kicks off a debate about student debts, based on an alarming (alarmist?) Wall Street Journal article.

Students are borrowing dramatically more to pay for college, accelerating a trend that has wide-ranging implications for a generation of young people…

The ripple effects for today’s heavily indebted young people are becoming palpable. A growing body of research suggests that tough loan payments are affecting major life decisions by recent graduates, forcing them to put off traditional milestones—from buying a first home to even marriage and having children.

This may sound insane, but I tend to see student debt among young people as a sign of progress, rather than a sign of dire social calamity. I know, I know, outraged politicians trot out statistics about how 22 year olds today have an average of £25,000 of debt, when their parents had no debt at all, so ‘proving’ that we’re treating the next generation terribly [etc. etc.].

Are they right? Isn’t it obvious that someone with £25,000 of debt is worse off than someone with no debt at all?

It may be obvious, but in this case it’s also wrong. In 1965 only 9% of British young people went to university. There were very few places, and only upper classes could afford it. By 2001 more than 35% of young people were in higher education, and it keeps climbing.

What does this have to do with debt? Well back in 1965 it was also almost impossible for a young person to ‘borrow’ against their expected future earnings. Either your parents supported you at Uni, in which case you went, or they couldn’t afford to, in which case you didn’t. Banks wouldn’t touch you, because you had nothing to act as ’security’ on a loan (on a mortgage they can repossess your house, but on a university loan? You can’t offer to become an indentured slave to the bank if you failed to meet repayments).

In other words, the vast majority of potential university students were massively ‘credit constrained’. There was a profitable trade to be made between you and the  bank – ‘You lend me money to study, I’ll earn more in future and pay back the loan’ – but the risk was too high.

That made it easier to start saving for a house – because you had no debts, and started in the labour market at a younger age. But it made it a damn sight harder to finish saving for a house – because you were earning peanuts.

Today, in contrast, we have a generous system of student loans, accompanying the massive rise in participation. You only repay your loan after you graduate, and only when you start earning above £15,000 (so if you don’t get that higher paying job right away, that’s OK). All remaining debt is forgiven after 25 years (so if you never get that higher paying job, that’s OK too).

The upshot of all this is that young people are in much more debt than they used to be. But that’s overwhelmingly a good thing. Because more of them are going to be graduates, they’re going to land (and create) higher paying jobs, in higher value industries, boosting GDP and taxes.

So when politicians (or outraged journalists) tell you that our kids are in more debt than we were, remember: that may well be their gain, and our loss…

… but in Azerbaijan, it’s a donkey.

This post will consist of four facts about the world, plus an apology. First the facts:

1. I learnt about blogging through years of addiction to the writings of Felix Salmon and Tyler Cowen
2. Felix Salmon says that you should blog frequently – even if it’s a case of quantity over quality
3. On Thursday Felix Salmon linked to my blog, and said nice things about my thoughts. Felix Salmon. Linked. To my thoughts. I wouldn’t be a blog-geek if this didn’t make me happy. To think, just a week after my first spam comment…
4. Also on Thursday, I went off on holiday, and abandoned my blog for three days.

Argh.

Now the apology:

Welcome to anyone finding this blog by way of Felix, and apologies for breaking the First Rule Of Blogging (which is: ‘Blog. Now.’) I’ll be back home soon. Promise.

… when you get your first Spam comment.

A moment of true pride. Before I removed it.

Front page story of yesterday’s Times: Fat, unfit NHS staff top the sick league

More than 45,000 NHS workers call in sick each day — one and a half times the rate of absence seen in the private sector.

The first national audit of staff habits has found that high rates of obesity, smoking, absenteeism and poor mental health are having a direct impact on the quality of patient care.

A large body of evidence suggests that health workers tend to have poor health – mental and physical. It’s well known, for example, that doctors have a startlingly high suicide rate. Many causes are cited, including the stressful nature of the job, the long hours, the life-or-death responsibility.

Here’s the strange thing: in almost every other profession, economists worry about well-informed workers (car mechanics, say, or estate agents) using their superior knowledge for their own personal gain. Steve Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) has a well-known paper showing that estate agents sell their own houses for more than their clients’ (by holding out longer for better offers).

So doctors know more about personal health than just about anyone on the planet. When they get sick, they have a wealth of knowledge about the right tests, scans, treatments – even the ‘best’ specialists to see.  Based on the estate agent example, we’d expect doctors to have fabulous health. And yet that’s not what we see at all…

P.S. Since I’ve linked to Dr. Crippen’s post on suicide among doctors, I should also note that he’s not at all impressed with the report cited by the Times.

… and welcome to Hundred Pockets. I’m sure we won’t be short of things to talk about.

A recession (you may have heard), an election (soon), a 150 million year old squid you can use as a fountain pen – it’s a big, wide, wonderful world. So let’s get cracking…