From - who else? - Steven Landsburg in Slate:

If you’re facing foreclosure, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson wants to help. “If someone is willing to make a call to reach out,” says Paulson, “there’s a chance we can save their homes.” But Paulson can’t save these homes because the homes are not endangered in the first place. They stand to change hands, not to vanish.
None of these foreclosed houses is going to disappear. After a foreclosure, one family moves out, and another moves in. We see the sad faces of the people moving out, but we don’t as often see the happy faces of the new homeowners moving in. Nevertheless, those happy faces are out there, and we should not discount them.

The whole thing is brief and, as always, worth a read. I broadly agree, although I wonder about the general cost in time, trouble and legal fees of kicking one family out and moving another family in. Is it largely internalised? I am not sure.

<!– –> From the FT Techblog:

Imagine playing Halo 3 with a lot more at stake than losing a virtual life. What if, every time you were injured by an opponent, your bank account took a hit as well?
That’s the idea behind Kwari, a “first-person shooter skill-based cash-for-kills” online game, set to debut in the New Year. [That’s 2008, I’m slow to catch up - TH]
Players of Kwari will suffer automatic deductions from their bank accounts when they are hit in a game, as well as deposits when they strike their opponents. The amounts can be anything from one cent to one dollar per hit depending on the stakes for the game.
There is also a fractional cost if they pick up additional weapons or health packs, with the money being pooled into a jackpot.
In 16 to 64 player match-ups, jackpots are shared between the gamer in possession of a smoking sphere called the Pill at the end of the game and the player who had held it the longest.

What’s the likely response? Probably better overall skills - behavioural economics suggests that substantial but not insanely-high incentives improve performance. One might expect that incompetent players would flee for less expensive games, but online poker suggests that there is rarely a shortage of noobs. Hmmm - shooting fish in a barrel!
[Halo 3 screenshot from TeamXbox.]

My father and my mother met at a venerable English university. I went to the same place, as did two of my sisters. Now that my stepbrother has followed in our footsteps, I am starting to think that there may be more than coincidence behind the whole business.

If we accept that fluke is an unlikely explanation for the uniformity of the Harford educational experience, it is an example of what economists call “intergenerational transmission of educational attainment”. Intergenerational transmission of income is a closely related issue: do the children of rich parents grow up to be rich, and do the children of poor parents grow up to be poor?

The simple answer is that it depends in which country they live. In the US and the UK, if your parents were twice as rich as the average for their generation, you could expect to be 40 per cent richer than the average for your generation and so your children could expect to be about 16 per cent richer than the average for theirs. (more…)

Dear Economist,
I am amazed by people who stand outside in front of the opening doors of trains and lifts knowing full well that the people inside will have to exit before they can enter. Obstructing the Exiters will only delay them, and the Enterers seem to be in such a rush that this is surely not in their best interests. What is astonishing is that this is a universal phenomenon. Explain!
Nazir Kazi

Dear Nazir,

I, too, have observed this phenomenon with trains but more rarely with lifts, and I think that suggests an explanation.

It is true that by obstructing people who are leaving the train, people may delay it by a few seconds.

A few seconds delay to everyone on the train is an appreciable social loss, but scarcely matters to the selfish individual in question.

True, a delay is a delay.

But you have misinterpreted what such people are aiming to do. They are not trying to hasten the departure of the train; they are trying to get a seat. That means being the first into the carriage just as seats are being vacated, which in turn means standing in front of the opening doors and generally getting in everybody’s way.

It is a classic prisoner’s dilemma: everyone would be better off if everyone hung back, but each individual does better for himself by pushing forward.

It is not surprising that this behaviour is more unusual when it comes to lifts. Lifts do not have seats, and usually have room to accommodate everyone who is waiting.

The behaviour you describe is selfish, but it is not irrational.

Questions to economist@ft.com

The rigours of the book tour mean that I am very late to this piece in Fast Company, but perhaps it is still news to some of you. The writer, Clive Thompson, reminds us of Malcom Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” and the role of influential opinion-formers in spreading news:

These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. “What we are really saying,” he writes, “is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others.” In modern marketing, this idea–that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends–is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free. Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims “E-Fluentials” can “make or break a brand.” According to MarketingVOX, an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billon is spent a year on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at 36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising. That’s on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.
Yet, if you believe [Duncan] Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.

I would not be quite so quick to write off “The Tipping Point” - in any case its main merit has always been that it’s a cracking read. But Duncan Watts is a fascinating researcher and the Fast Company article is excellent too. You can also read a piece Watts wrote for the New York Times last year. And inspired by these pieces, I’ve just read Watts’s book, “Six Degrees” and heartily recommend it. (Confusion alert: there is another book out there with the same title.)