Google Finance is now offering free realtime stock quotes for the NASDAQ, with promises of more realtime data to come.

It must be rather tough to be a competitor of Google.

It’s a little old so you might have seen it, but I just came across this interesting video. A photographer took a photo once a month from 1969 to 2004 from the same position in Shinjuku, the ‘new’ downtown centre of Tokyo. The video shows the sequence of photos in 10 seconds. I wish I could find the original photos. Anyway it’s pretty amazing what people can do in a few decades …

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.