I just came across indeed.com’s job trends service where you can graph the frequency of different keywords in job advertisements in the US. Their database of ads aggregates those from job websites and newspapers etc. Here’s the trend for “economics” over the past few years:

That’s higher than I expected, about 0.75% of all job ads. However here’s economics versus finance and marketing:

You can also change the graph to show relative growth rather than absolute levels. Here’s the same graph on that basis, which is quite interesting:

It looks like economists are in demand (relatively speaking).

Check out what the internet looked like in 1996.

In 1995 I had a summer job working for an early ISP in New Zealand. We had banks of 28.8k modems which shared a 64kbps connection managed by a Sun workstation. The company only had four people including me and I was the customer support department. Getting connected in those days was difficult for most people so I used to go to each new customer’s house or business and configure their system, and explain a few things. Most people’s PCs didn’t have a modem so the first step was to install one, and then install copies of Netscape for the web and Eudora for email. We charged by the megabyte. I remember that people had trouble grasping the concept of the “back” and “forwards” buttons. They didn’t understand that you can’t go back until you’ve visited at least one prior page, and you can’t go forward until you’ve gone back. I also once trained a bunch of Toshiba New Zealand executives about how to use email and the web.

Good times …

Constant dream points to a series of video and audio microeconomics and macroeconomics lectures by Kenneth Long of New River College. I haven’t actually watched them to see if they’re any good, but they do seem to be comprehensive.

Something that I’d really like to see is a video series of lectures based on Preston McAfee’s open source micro textbook.

This also seems a good time to remind people about my directory of free online economics books. Please contact me to suggest any additions that you know of.

I just read this bizarre story about a flight from Australia to New Zealand where, after the passengers had boarded, a cabin crew member became ill, and the flight needed to lose 13 passengers before it could take off (safety regulations mean you have to have at least a certain ratio of crew to passengers). Apparently there was a lot of trouble encouraging people to get off, as it doesn’t seem that much incentive was given, and the airline resorted to bullying tactics.

Some people reluctantly got off after they were offered a free flight in future, but if I were the captain of the plane I would have conducted an auction … The only question would be whether to sell the right to stay on the flight or pay people to get off. From an efficiency point of view it doesn’t matter, as long as the required number of people get off. But I guess from a PR point of view it would be better to pay people to get off. With 90 passengers in the auction, the amount the airline would have to pay to get people off probably wouldn’t be too high.

I want one of these and I want it now … 3D virtual desktop using head tracking. Keep watching past the geeky explanations towards the end where he gives a demo of the thing working, it’s amazing.

(HT: FSJ).