Top all-time · #1607
CARPE DIEM
Personal blog · mjperry.blogspot.comeconomicsbusiness
CARPE DIEM is a personal blog at mjperry.blogspot.com about economics and business. Since 2007, 45 different Hacker News readers have linked it 52 times, most often “Size Matters: $30,000 Per Inch”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 34 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Mark Perry's CARPE DIEM economics blog for charts and data on US living standards, inflation, housing, healthcare and jobs, often cited as sources in arguments about those topics.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter calls a linked overview of the fixed pie fallacy a decent one.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 34 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /2011/05/because-of-rent-control-sf-has-31000.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-02-13
- Size Matters: $30,000 Per Inch2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-02-17
What Hacker News says?
Americans are much richer than Europeans so this doesn’t seem like an obvious choice. As of 2011 the UK and France were poorer than all but two US states, Germany poorer than all but six[1]. That understates how much richer the US is. Look at average household consumption [2]. The US, 5% of the human race, is behind Hong Kong, a city state and almost $10,000 ahead of Switzerland. Average individual consumption would…
Comment linking /2011/06/americas-economic-success-vs-europe.html?m=1
on “A new weapon in arbitration: sheer volume”Submitted Newspaper Ad Revenues Fall to 50-Year Low in 2011 as a story · 58 points
HN discussionMaybe I'm the ignorant one but are you conflating gas from oil with natural gas, which actually has been driven to record low prices[1], so much so that utilities have switched from coal to natural gas at such a fast pace that it reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by a considerable amount in 2012[2]? "Prices as high as ever and destroy the environment as a bonus" may be doubly wrong. [1] http://mjperry.blogspot.co…
Comment linking /2011/12/abundant-natural-gas-leads-to-record.html
on “A Mysterious Patch Of Light Shows Up In The North Dakota Dark”Submitted The Higher Education Bubble: It's About to Burst as a story · 47 points
HN discussionYou may be confusing where profits can be made and who makes them vs. where capital is deployed. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/10/trade-deficit-capital-in... http://topforeignstocks.com/2009/06/13/the-top-net-capital-i... It has to do with the balance of payments. US entities do invest and make profits overseas. However, investments into the US (including loans to the US Treasury, for example) happen in larger am…
Comment linking /2010/10/trade-deficit-capital-inflow-bop-0.html
on “Why the U.S. Spends So Much More Than Other Nations on Health Care”Submitted Per-Capita, the U.S. is a Century Ahead of China as a story · 36 points
HN discussionFrom a systems point of view the changes where dramatic. "Farmers today grow five times as much corn as they did in the 1930s – on 20 percent less land. That is 13 million acres or 20,000 square miles, twice the size of Massachusetts. The yield per acre has skyrocketed from 24 bushels in 1931 to 154 now, or a six-fold gain. And the Agriculture Department expects the average yield per acre to double in the next 25 ye…
Comment linking /2011/05/corn-yields-have-increased-6x-since.html
on “Healthy soil is key to feeding the world”Submitted Mississipi is richer than Europe as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSort of like: 1979 "Gold Always Goes Up" http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/09/chart-of-day-inflation-a...
Comment linking /2010/09/chart-of-day-inflation-adjusted-gold.html
on “Visualization of stock market performance over time, adjusted for inflation”Submitted Jaw-Dropping Compensation: College Professors vs. College Football Coaches as a story · 14 points
HN discussion> Edit: To provide some clarity on the comments below highlighting that housing costs are included in CPI. Each country calculates inflation statistics to various methodologies. CPI in the US includes a rent equivalent value which is independent of the actual cost of purchasing a home. Real monthly mortgage payments have actually been going down relative to inflation: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/12/payments-for…
Comment linking /2011/12/payments-for-new-house-have-never-been.html
on “Banks, QE, and Money-Printing”Submitted Print Newspaper Advertising Will be Lower This Year Than in 1950 as a story · 6 points
HN discussionNope: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/05/2009-most-energy-efficie... . The amount of energy needed to produce $1 of output keeps falling.
Comment linking /2010/05/2009-most-energy-efficient-economy-in.html
on “It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs”Submitted Calculus in 20 Minutes as a story · 6 points
HN discussionNo. Rent control does lead to shortages. I have about $6 million to invest in rental properties. San Francisco is not being considered. I'm actually liquidating all my California assets, as the INCENTIVE to operate rentals has been destroyed. Have a read of this: "Due to Rent Control, S.F. Has 31,000 Vacant Housing Units As Frustrated Landlords Give Up" The Bay Citizen -- "In San Francisco, one of the toughest place…
Comment linking /2011/05/because-of-rent-control-sf-has-31000.html
on “The Suicide of Venezuela”Submitted Size Matters: $30,000 Per Inch as a story · 5 points
HN discussion“Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” -Milton Friedman I just googled "Fixed pie fallacy" - I was assuming (probably wrongly) that most people were familiar with it. I'm not even certain Friedman was the first to identify it. The first thing I come up with on Google is [1]. It's a decent overview. [1] http://mjp…
Comment linking /2006/12/fixed-pie-fallacy.html
on “Meet the New Super People”Submitted The Unsustainable College Textbook Bubble as a story · 4 points
HN discussionCurrently, there are substantially more females than males (60/40) among people receiving college degrees: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/06/women-dominate-higher-ed... Education is the widely recognized source of power. Should we strive for 50/50 and if so, how should we achieve it?
Comment linking /2009/06/women-dominate-higher-education-at.html
on “My experiences at a woman's programming workshop”Submitted Protecting Toads To Keep Private Land Private as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWe hardly ever see consideration of the other party in these debates. Tenants cry about high rents. What about supply and demand? There are two main causes of supply problems: (1) tough building permitting, anti-building policy seemingly; (2) shortage of willing landlords. If I have $5 million dollars to invest, will I invest in San Francisco where (unless I buy post-1979, and 75% of units are rent controlled in SF)…
Comment linking /2011/05/because-of-rent-control-sf-has-31000.html
on “The Housing Market in San Francisco and Ideas to Fix It”Submitted Hospitals Feeling Competition from Retail Clinics? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI have seen the $73/hr number cited as non-executive compensation. That's total compensation, not just wages, which covers the cost of benefits and the like. edit: This has some links: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/11/should-we-really-bail-ou...
Comment linking /2008/11/should-we-really-bail-out-7320-per-hour.html
on “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”Submitted Today's GPA-Inflated and Tuition-Inflated World as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf I understand your argument correctly, you're saying that the results might be explained by the vast majority of productivity gains happening among the 1%, so that the median worker's productivity hasn't really increased as much as the overall average productivity. I don't think that's correct, for two reasons: 1) The 1% necessarily account for a small percentage of workers, and thus are unlikely to account for th…
Comment linking /2010/02/us-manufacturing-ouput-per-worker.html
on “The 4 AM Army ”Submitted Breaking down AP testing by gender as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf Sweden would have been a US state, it would have been the poorest of them all. At least that was true a few years ago. EDIT: I only had links in Swedish to sources, but here's one in English: http://www.shsweb.fi/forum/1/28783/28785/ Another: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/11/sweden-mississippi-if-sw... But do note that Sweden has seen a very strong growth the last year while the US has slowed somewhat. EDIT 2:…
Comment linking /2007/11/sweden-mississippi-if-sweden-joined-us.html
on “Website calculates how your life might be like in another country.”Submitted Diamonds,Cocaine and Coffee as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPlease look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools. I'm aware of the documentary, and as usual, it completely misses the point. I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of America's public and private schools (both the best and the worst on both sides). For the past several years I've had daily exposure to pretty much all angles of this…
Comment linking /2007/10/private-school-tuition-13-to-12-less.html
on ““There is no longer enough mail to sustain six days of delivery.””Submitted Detroit: Two-Tier Wages Could Be Part of the American Manufacturing as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
