Economist's View: "Why This New Crisis Needs a New Paradigm of Economic Thought" [More Side of the road blogging - stopped for a moment at the Great Salt Lake.] When I talked to the senate's COP panel, one of many things that I emphasized was the need to develop plans in advance to deal with various contingencies. Without such plans policy actions - even justifiable ones - appear ad hoc and also face resistance that delays their implementation or prevents them from being put into place altogether. For example, we need a plan on the shelf and ready to go for dismantling large banks that have failed, something that has received a lot of attention.
It has received much less attention, but I also think we need a plan for disposing troubled financial assets when the need arises. Why this new crisis needs a new paradigm of economic thought, by Keiichiro Kobayashi, Commentary, Vox EU: The policies being debated in the US and Europe today are almost identical to those that played out in Japan a decade or so ago. Japan redux? The challenge for macroeconomics References. Economist's View: On Buiter, Goodwin, and Nonlinear Dynamics. Cloud on Economist.com aggregates reader comments | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog.
Google’s Chief Economist: “Newspapers Have Never Made Much Money From News” Earlier today, Google chief economist Hal Varian gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news. Google is understandably on the defensive, trotting out Varian to paint an unemotional picture with as much data as he can muster.
But the picture he paints is a dour one for print media. For instance, the chart above shows the decline of overall newspaper ad revenues. The collapse in print ad revenues is coming from two places: the overall ad recession of the past couple years and the shift to online news consumption. Varian concludes: “Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.”
“The fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news,” says Varian. The Newsweekly’s Last Stand - The Atlantic (July/August 2009) Image: Stephen Webster Newsweek’s recent decision to get out of the news-digesting business and reposition itself as a high-end magazine selling in-depth commentary and reportage follows Time magazine’s emergency retrenchment along similar lines.
It accelerates a process by which the 76-year-old weekly will purposely reduce its circulation from 2.7 million to a bit more than half of that. (Its circulation was nearly 3.5 million in 1988.) Likewise, Time’s circulation, which 20 years ago was close to 5 million, is now at 3.4 million. Both newsweeklies are seeking to avoid the fate of U.S. News & World Report, which after years (decades?) Of semi-relevance gave up on the idea of weekly publication entirely. These tactical retreats by Newsweek and Time are brave stabs at relevance in a changing media environment.
In the digital age, with its overabundance of information, the modern newsweekly is in a particularly poignant position. The easy lesson might be that quality wins out.