Guy Berger

Also, "Minor's Holiday" (though the version from the Cafe Bohemia is better). Guy

1) I actually spoke to my local post office. Their story is that the mailman was putting my mail in my mailbox, then someone (unknown, the post office is investigating) was putting it back out. So the post office stopped delivering my mail and labelled me as no longer living there. 2) My apartment complex claims that they have only one mailman, who has a name I will not reveal here, and that he is the only guy who has access to the mailboxes. So they don't understand what happened, but will talk to him tomorrow. 3) I actually got mail today, presumably due to calling the post office. 4) However, according to the post office, they have no clue what happened to the mail which was supposed to arrive in the interim. The best I can hope for is that someone returned to sender. Lost in the ether, I suppose. Moral of the story: if you don't get mail for two days in a row, call the post office asap to get this shit resolved. Guy

It would be strange as the mailboxes are very clearly labeled with numbers, but I suppose anything can happen. Guy

I just called the post office's "customer service" line, where they assured me "they take this kind of thing very seriously". I will supposedly get a call tomorrow. This should be interesting... Guy

Oddly enough, I have not received any mail (aside from one bit of junk mail I addressed to residents of my apartment) since last Friday. This includes a magazine I usually get on Saturdays and a Netflix movie that was supposed to arrive on Saturday. This has happened to me once before -- about a year and a half ago -- and it lasted for (I think) two weeks. At the time, unlike now, I was not living in a large apartment complex. Nor had I moved recently at the time. Normally I would worry about identity theft, but none of my accounts (netflix, bank, magazine) are indicating a change of address. That said, I would like to resume deliveries of my mail. Tomorrow I plan to call my complex's office to see whether anybody else is having the same problems. But assuming that the answer is "no", do I have any other recourse? I assume that if I call the post office they'll say "how the hell should we know?" Anybody else ever experienced a mail stoppage? Your wisdom would be appreciated. Guy * Other possibilities: 1) While all of the relevant mail is addressed to my new/current abode, I did have mail forwarding set up. Perhaps the Post Office set up some crazy forwarding that sends correctly-addressed mail to my old address? 2) For a while (until the mail stopped) I was getting some of the previous resident's mail. (He has a different name than me.) Perhaps HE set up forwarding and for some reason it's capturing my mail as well?

It seems like some of the restrictions on payday lenders hurt the very people they intend to protect...

Most of you have probably seen (or at least heard of) this incident, but for those of you who haven't, here's the link. I won't spoil the contents, but in front of Queen Elizabeth, John Lennon gives a classic introduction to "Twist and Shout". Guy

Just listened to this for the first time recently. (Part of a big BMG Blue Note binge.) It's phenomenal, one of the very best Jimmy Smith albums I've heard! And I'm not a hardcore JS fan. Guy

What is J&R's backorder policy? Guy

Over here social security is linked to inflation, which usually lags wages. So that, when people retire, their standard of living represents some formulation relating to what they've managed to achieve in their years at work. And that does leave some room for productivity improvements to meet the demands of extra people living longer. How much and whether sufficient are harder questions. Yup. If, as in the UK, you peg social security growth to the growth rate of prices (inflation), then productivity improvements could definitely fill the gap. To my mind there is no ethical question at all. All pensions, no matter how provided, are inter-generational transfers. Even if a person saves all his life and lives solely on the interest after retirement, that is still an inter-generational transfer. Because the savings and interest had been, and could still have been, used as investments for something in the "younger" economy. Well, I think the issue comes from the fact that there are government dictated transfers.

Paul Collier is one of the top economist experts on Sub-Saharan Africa. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It By Paul Collier Oxford University Press; 224 pages; $28 and £16.99 Here's a link to Oxford University Press's site for the book. I can never remember how to put Organissimo-supporting amazon links, so maybe somebody else can add one...

Really, what Baumol is saying - and it makes sense to me - is that some sectors of services - those that emphasise or rely on personal performance, such as nurses, lap dancers and prostitutes etc - can't get much more productive per se without sacrificing quality. So if you include figures for those occupations in an average for all services, they drag the averages down. I was somewhat cryptic in my earlier comment, so let me clarify. (And also put the disclaimer that Baumol is a very prestigious economist and I'm just a peon, hence all I write could be complete crap.) There are two "meanings" of productivity. One is "how many units can you produce an hour." The other is "how much value can you produce in an hour." (There's also a third meaning -- labor productivity. The amount of units or value produced by a unit of worker effort.) In the 1st sense, it's certainly possible that manufacturing productivity is growing faster than services productivity. But it's not clear to me why this description of productivity is that important for this comparison. Let's say we have a hypothetical economy with two activities -- producing food and producing soap sculptures. People choose to spend 99.9999% of their income on food and 0.0001% on soap sculptures. Let's also say that soap sculpture productivity is growing at 2 times the rate of manufacturing productivity. Does this productivity boom in soap sculptures provide much benefit for the citizens of this economy? As I said, I'm a complete dilettante on the economics of productivity. But I think it makes more sense when talking about productivity growth, particularly when comparing across sectors or industries, to look at changes in value rather than changes in output. You're a 100% right, MG. 1) What should actually matter (all things being equal) is (if my economics brain is working properly on a Saturday morning) the level of productivity, not the rate of productivity growth. Of course, given enough time, if activity A is growing faster than B, it will catch up and then leap ahead. But if manufacturing productivity is currently at a lower level than services productivity, then the heavy tilt of resources toward services could be consistent with a higher rate of productivity growth in manufacturing. 2) Marginal, not average, productivity matters. It could be that for existing manufacturing activities, the average level (or growth rate) of productivity is higher than that in existing service activities. This is completely consistent with the marginal productivity of the two sectors being equal. 3) As you say, rate of return on investment is not the same thing as productivity. It could be that the services sector is more monopolistic (for at least some factors of production) than the manufacturing sector. For example, in some industries capital and/or labor may be able to capture productivity gains whereas in others those gains are almost immediately passed onto consumers. However, this wouldn't explain a very long-term deviation, because eventually (in the very long run) only the differential productivity growth rate would matter. And in general, I don't find this story to be very plausible. 4) For whatever reason, manufacturing activity generates positive externalities whereas services activity does not. This would result in a market failure. However, my comments on (3) pretty much apply to this. 5) A market failure due to lack of information. Again, I think my comments on (3) apply to this one. And I find it to be extremely implausible that workers or investors are unaware of large unexploited gaps in returns between sectors of the economy.

Leaving aside the ethical question of whether younger people should be forced to fork over chunks of their income to fund an ever-lengthening retirement period (not saying that this is cut-and-dried, but I think it is an open question), there's also a practical problem with betting on productivity increases (at least in the US).* Here in the US, social security is indexed to wages. Since in the long run wages pretty much grow at the same rate as productivity, there aren't any productivity increases left to support a shrinking workers-to-retirees ratio. Guy *Personally, I think that (excepting certain types of intense manual labor), if you're going to live longer, you should also work longer. And yes, when I hit 60 my opinion on this may do a 180.

In fact, my understanding is that obesity in the US is very much associated with poverty. (Poverty supposedly has similar associations with other unhealthy habits -- cigarette smoking, etc.) Guy

It seems weird to me that someone would object to Yes on the basis of their lyrics. I mean, yeah, if you try to take them literally/at-face-value then they come off as goofy, but this criticism seems to be off the mark. Would we take seriously similar criticism directed at scat singing? Guy

Yup. An enterprising public health statistician/economist would do us all a service by attempting to harmonize the international data. Guy

While you are correct to a degree, I don't think it's as big of a degree as you think. The British thought "services" could replace manufacturing, as did other major economic powers of the past. When they reached that stage, they were already fading. As are we. To dredge up this topic, there was an interesting article in the WSJ yesterday. (Quoted below.) I'm not an expert on productivity but IMHO the idea that in the United States services have low productivity growth and manufacturing have high productivity growth is either BS, or irrelevant. If there really is a big gap in productivity growth between the two sectors, why aren't resources flowing from services to manufacturing?

I agree, but this is better than nothing. Guy

I like the guy's playing on the BNs where he appears; he would add a little bit of spice. But I'm not convinced that he could carry a date. Guy

I'm not having problems, the article is definitely there. Guy

I spent half an hour this morning looking for this clip: link Does anybody have clips of the following scenes: * the policeman chasing the brothers around the apt after breakfast (here) * Harpo and Chico playing with the orchestra