Wall Street and Technology, Liquidity Shift, here.  Nice drill down Execution Venue Map w. CME, Equinix, NYSE Mahwah, Nasdaq OMX, Savvis, Telx 8th Ave., Telx Clifton, Telx Hudson, Telx Weehawken, and Wall Street.

Mankiw, From Harvard Commencement, here. Sunshine debate settled.

NYT,  For Tech Start-Ups, New York Has Increasing Allure, here.

Such collaborations are New York’s biggest draw. The biggest drawback is hiring. Silicon Valley has the deepest pool of qualified engineers in the country, because of Stanford and the major technology companies that are based there. On the East Coast, many talented engineers gravitate to finance, which offers salaries that start-ups cannot compete with.

Forbes, What Jack White Can Teach Us About Economics, here. Supply and Demand with Jack White via Mankiw.

You don’t think of rock stars as the bearers of economics lessons (despite the occasional London School of Economics student among them). But Jack White recently demonstrated an admirable understanding of basic economics. White’s record label, Third Man Records, puts out limited prints of records in order to meet customer demand “to be involved in collecting rare and interesting vinyl”. There is a problem with this though. If you make something rare and valuable, the market price will be high. So when White set the prices low, people would show up at the Third Man store and buy up dozens of copies then sell them on ebay for hundreds of dollars.

Sinostand, Video: Biking through China’s Countryside, here. Best video of the week via Marginal Revolution.

After I visited Yellow Mountain a few years ago and had the worst day of my China life, I swore to myself I would never endure another tourist trap again. Never again would I stand in line all day and pay hundreds of yuan for the privilege. Never again would I go to a “historical” site, only to be surrounded by droves of flag-wielding guides herding around groups in matching hats. So two years ago my girlfriend and I bought some long-distance bikes in order to access places you’d never think to buy a train ticket to. It was the best investment we ever made.

For our last trip, I brought along a video camera and have put together this short documentary with the footage. So watch as we ride through Shandong’s countryside, meet old farmers, chat with Catholic peasants, and get an up close look at China’s housing bubble:

DeLong, WHY OH WHY CAN’T WE HAVE A BETTER PRESS CORPS? YES, NEW YORK TIMES, I AM LOOKING AT YOU DEPARTMENT, here. DeLong on Douthat on Facebook.

So why does Ross Douthat think it is? Well, he reads his Bloomberg Businessweek, he hears of the (justified) annoyance of traders at the inability of the NASDAQ to smoothly manage the IPO, and he hears of the disappointment of those who had bet that the market would value Facebook not as a $75 billion (i.e., $32/share) but as a $90 billion business (i.e., the $38/share IPO price) or as a $100 billion business (i.e., $42/share). For those who had placed big bets that it would be at least a $90 billion business, the fact that it has turned out to be only a $75 billion business is–for them–the biggest IPO flop of the decade.

But to call the creation of a $75 billion company in 8 1/2 years ex nihilo a “stock market failure”?

Ross Douthat has no clue what he is talking about.

Boom!

ars technica, Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome, here.

In 1999 a pair of researchers published a paper called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF).” David Dunningand Justin Kruger (both at Cornell University’s Department of Psychology at the time) conducted a series of four studies showing that, in certain cases, people who are very bad at something think they are actually pretty good. They showed that to assess your own expertise at something, you need to have a certain amount of expertise already.

Use that Kahneman result about donations doubling when witnessed by a picture with eyes. Make the subjects fill out their self-assessment in front of a picture with eyes watching them. I think they will straighten up a bit, even though they don’t know what they don’t know, they know.
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