I’m going to take a break from blogging for the end of year holidays for about 10 days. A big thanks to everyone who read my blog this year, as there’s not much point writing a blog if no one reads it.

My survey of econ bloggers is now finished, and I’m very happy that out of the 218 bloggers I invited to participate, I received 107 responses (49%). Thanks to all the bloggers who gave up their time to contribute to this project, I have a decent number of responses and I’m looking forward to analysing the results. I’ll post the results and dataset on my blog when I’m done, probably around mid January.

So until next year, enjoy the holidays, and thanks again for reading!

PS: The last 2 seconds of this video are quite funny:

Paul Krugman has an interesting graph on his blog of carbon dioxide emissions for the US, China and Europe from 1980 to 2005. The data are from the US Energy Information Administration (xls data file). Here’s a reproduction of Krugman’s graph, with the rest of the world added in:

Obviously there’s been a big increase in emissions by China in the past few years. The other thing that stood out to me from my version of the graph was how big the ‘everybody else’ category is — in 2005 it’s about 43% of total emissions. Of the everybody else category, the top five by 2005 emissions are Russia, Japan, India, Canada and South Korea:

Here’s another version of the first graph with emissions in 1980 indexed to 100 for all countries. This makes China look scarier:

Just for fun, I calculated each country’s emissions in 2005 relative to 1980. Who’s been the baddest in terms of increased total emissions over this time? You’ll never guess … it’s Greenland. They’re really gonna have to rename their country. Greenland’s emissions increased by a factor of about 120 according to this dataset, from about 0.0049 million metric tons in 1980 to about 0.59 million metric tons in 2005.

Ok, I admit that some of the data for small countries back in 1980 might be unreliable … actually Greenland has ‘NA’ values for 1985 - 1991 and then there’s a massive jump in 1995, but I really had to laugh, I mean Greenland. To be fair, let’s take the 10 years from 1995 to 2005 instead. Over this period, the number one increase in emissions is by Equatorial Guinea, which increased its emissions by 4.6 times. The biggest decrease was Guam, with a 40% reduction.

Some of the comments on Krugman’s blog insisted that the graphs should be done on a per-capita basis. I don’t really know why, since it’s total emissions that matter for the climate. Anyway, here’s total emissions per capita based on some other data on the EIS website (xls data source). It’s hard to do an ‘everybody else’ category for this one so I put the total world average instead:

Those damn Americans and their SUVs. Again we can make China look scary by indexing 1980 to 100:

Not being an environmental economist, I don’t have a lot more to add to these, but it was an interesting exercise just to make the graphs.

From the ultra-cynical department:

Having trouble making money from your blog? Here’s a novel business model: Start a blog about rumours of upcoming Apple products. If you do a really good job, Apple will sue you. No problem, just plead the First Amendment. Then, Apple will pay you to stop.

I thought it would never happen. I’ve been using computers since I was a baby. My first spoken words were “syntax error”. My kindergarten teacher scolded me for writing “goto” instead of “go to”. I first used the Internet on Windows 3.1 when you had to pay for a copy of the Netscape browser. I remember when tables were first introduced to HTML, wow, what a revolution that was for web designers.

Anyway … I thought I was on top of all this tech stuff, and then I found this site. It’s another social networking site, or something, but the thing is, I can’t quite understand it, and the interface makes me dizzy. It’s really happening — I’m getting old and falling behind the tech curve. I used to think that my kids would never tease me for not being able to use whatever new gadget came out in 2013 like I teased my father in 1983 for not being able to program the VCR. But it seems it’s really going to happen, something really does change when you hit 30.

This video, via Google Tech Talks, looks interesting, if a little conspiracy-theoretical:

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank will talk about how World War II set the stage for the creation and explosive growth of Silicon Valley, and the role of Frederick Terman and Stanford in working with government agencies (including the CIA and the National Security Agency) to set up companies in this area that sparked the creation of hundreds of other enterprises.

And why does Google always disable embedding of the YouTube videos of their tech talks?!