For those who don’t know, a bleg is a ‘blog beg’, where you ask your blog readers to help you with something. I forgot who coined this word, but it seems to be catching on. So here’s a bleg from me …

Recently there’s been a bit of debate in the econ blogosphere about why people blog, especially professional people like economists with high opportunity costs of time. Econbrowser has a good summary of the discussion. So I thought, why not try to do a quick survey of economics bloggers and collect some data? By my count there’s over 170 economics-related blogs, which should be enough for doing a simple survey. To keep the survey short, the main thing of interest is what motivates people to blog, and how much effort they spend on blogging. I’ve thought of a few questions, but before trying to launch the survey I’d like some feedback.

So if you’d like to help me out, click here (pdf) to view the questions that I have in mind. NOTE: This is not the survey itself! Please don’t send me answers to these questions. Please do send me feedback about the questions. I’ll wait a week for feedback, then set up an online survey and invite econ bloggers to take part. I’ll make the results freely available, and I don’t intend to profit from this in any way. I’m just genuinely interested in this issue.

I do not like to write about macroeconomics and related issues, because they’re not my areas of expertise, and I honestly know very little about them. However, let me indulge just once. Recently I’ve been reading Memories of Silk and Straw by Dr. Junichi Saga (the English translation). Dr. Saga was a medical doctor in rural Japan, and the book is based on his interviews with his elderly patients about their lives around 1900 - 1925. We do not often think of Japan as a poor country, but 100 years ago it was. The book is very well written and describes in detail the poverty in which many rural Japanese lived at that time.

As a person who’s spent his entire working life in front of a computer earning an above-average income, it’s hard to comprehend the lives that these people lived. Imagine working all day doing physical labour, six or seven days a week, in all seasons, just to earn enough money to feed your family rice and maybe a few vegetables. Not owning any property, and no insurance to cover you against sickness or injury. Imagine living with the stress of knowing that injuring yourself at work could mean starvation for your family. Of course, it wasn’t all misery; people have an amazing way of finding happiness even in the worst of situations. Still, I have no data to back this up, but I’m guessing that the poorest person in Japan today has a quality of life that’s better in every measure than the average rural peasant of 100 years ago.

Now, I’m speculating again, but I guess that the life of a Japanese peasant a century ago is not too different from that of many Chinese, Indians and Africans today. Reading these stories made me really appreciate what a tremendous difference economic growth can make to people’s lives. If I were to start my training as an economist over again, I’d think seriously about studying growth and development. I think the potential for economics to improve people’s lives by helping to raise productivity and living standards is equal to or greater than the potential of medicine or any other field to do the same.

Since I’m speculating a lot here, let me do a little bit more. I’m not an environmental economist either, but it seems that the growth paths that Japan and the other first-world countries have taken over the past 100 years are not sustainable from an environmental point of view. However, to deny economic growth to those currently living in poverty seems, to me, to be immoral and unconscionable. The challenge, therefore, is to figure out how to achieve sustainable growth. And now I started to sound like a politician, so I’d better stop.

Memories of Silk and Straw is a very interesting book for many reasons. On growth and development issues, I enjoy Dani Rodrik’s blog. On environmental issues, the Environmental Economics blog is awesome.

Joshua Gans thinks that the problem with online ‘tip jars’ is not that people don’t want to make tips, but that the relative cost of giving a tip, in terms of time and effort, is too high compared to not giving a tip. He suggests making not tipping more costly by requiring people to enter their payment details whether or not they tip will result in more tipping overall. It does sound like a sensible strategy if your objective is to raise money from tips. If you just want to be popular, or get your revenue from advertising, then making not tipping more costly will just reduce overall demand for your content, which you probably don’t want to do.

However, if people are really willing to give tips when it isn’t too annoying to do so, why hasn’t a norm emerged of regularly clicking one of the ads on a blog, for example, to show appreciation for the content? Websites get paid per click, so clicking is effectively the same thing as giving a tip, with the bonus that it doesn’t cost the clicker anything except a little time; certainly no more time than it would take to fill in the payment details for a tip. Has such a norm emerged and I’m just out of the loop? Or are people really not that generous?

On a related note, I did some searching about online tip jars, and I came across tipjar.com. Check it out, it’s truly bizarre! Is it a joke?

(Warning: Non-economics post).

A few weeks ago, I took the plunge and switched my computer from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux. Overall it’s been a pretty good experience. Ubuntu is fast and stable, and the interface is pretty clean and efficient. A few random observations:

I couldn’t live without MS Office, but using Crossover Linux I can run Office XP flawlessly (although I’ve only tried Word, Excel and Powerpoint, not Access or Outlook). OpenOffice is good, but its compatibility with MS Office is not 100%, so MS Office is essential if you want to work with other people on documents.

I also couldn’t live without Scientific Workplace (a wordprocessor for technical documents with an integrated computer algebra system). I tried Lyx + Maxima, but both have their shortcomings. Lyx can’t handle complex formatting but uses a special file format, so you can’t edit the Latex code by hand (as far as I can tell). And it’s too clumsy to re-type equations into Maxima for analysis. I solved this problem by using QEMU which allows you to run Windows inside Linux, using emulation. It’s a little slow, but it works fine and allows me to keep using Scientific Workplace.

There are two main desktop window manager systems available for Linux, “K” and “Gnome”. There are some differences in user interface standards between the two. Applications written for one will work on the other, but the interface can look a bit odd if you use a program written for one system inside the other, and some of the conventions are different, such as whether a double or single click is used to open folders. I really think the Linux community should standardise on one or the other. It’s hard enough to get people to switch from Windows without fragmenting the Linux market even further.

The default Ubuntu pdf viewer, Evince, sucks and I haven’t been able to find a better one (any suggestions?). It does dumb things like remembering your print settings when you close the program, so if you print “current page” this time, it will also default to printing the current page next time you use it, unless you remember to reset the print settings. Its search function is also very limited and a bit stupid. You can only navigate results by using “Next” and “Previous” buttons. With long documents, skipping though the search results can send you back to the first result before the program has finished searching the rest of the document. Imagine you have a 1000 page document, and just skipped through 10 results. Then you press “Next” the 11th time, and it sends you back to the first result, while it’s still searching the rest of the document, which takes a long time with 1000 pages. Now to get to result #11, you have to press “Next” another 11 times …

Finally, the “Gimp” image manipulation program is simply no match for Photoshop. It doesn’t have as many tools, especially for adjusting photos, and it’s very slow with large images. It also handles “camera raw” files from digital SLRs pretty badly. To be honest, this might be the thing that sends me back to Windows, unfortunately.

Check out the list of top 100 Wikipedia pages. Here’s the top 10 pages from the English site over the past few weeks, aside from the main Wikipedia page itself, with average views per day in brackets:

1. Wiki (862,286)
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (394,000)
3. Naruto (384,000)
4. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (378,286)
5. United States (315,429)
6. Wikipedia (314,286)
7. Deaths in 2007 (306,857)
8. Heroes (TV series) (293,143)
9. Transformers (film) (290,000)
10. Halo 3 (287,143)

One interesting thing is the huge diversity in the pages that people view. The top 100 pages combined (including the main Wikipedia page) make up less than 6% of total page views on the English Wikipedia.