Today’s column was about sexual discrimination at your local coffee shop, based on research by Caitlin Knowles Myers [pdf]. Sarah Black and Elizabeth Brainerd found evidence that competition does reduce discrimination. Chris Dillow’s blog alerted me to the paper. Gary Becker’s Nobel lecture is perhaps the best online discussion of his economic theory of discrimination. And I regret that there was no space in the article to mention the Sexpresso trend.

Felix Salmon thinks so:

Besides, I reckon that ad revenues can make up for lost subcription   revenues. According to Dow Jones, WSJ.com gets 8.3 million unique visitors a   month, and would need to raise that number to something over 20 million uniques   in order to keep total revenues constant. Never mind the accuracy of the numbers,   the key thing here is the percentage increase: readership would have to go up   by about 140%. Slate’s readership went up by many multiples of that after it   went free, and I reckon the WSJ’s would as well. People looking for financial   news right now don’t visit WSJ.com because they know it’s a pay site. If they   know it’s free, it could easily become the first best source for all financial   news and analysis online.

The New York Times recently went (almost entirely) free online, of course, and FT.com is offering free material to infrequent browsers. I’ve written a piece about these questions for FT Magazine, but confounded dead-tree deadlines means it won’t appear here until 20 October. But here’s a hint: I’ve been looking at the work of this man.