Buy Radiohead’s new album – price optional

I did – I love Radiohead beyond ordinary self-interest, though, so I paid ten pounds.

In a bold challenge to the music industry’s traditional business model, British band Radiohead have told fans they can pre-order a digital download of the band’s new album and pay whatever they want.

Technically that means people could opt to pay nothing – or next to nothing – for the album.

In Rainbows, the band’s seventh studio album, is due out on October 10 and can be ordered only through the band’s inrainbows.com website.

…

The unusual pricing model was made possible because the band is no longer attached to any label. Radiohead’s contract with EMI/Capitol expired after the release of their last album, Hail to the Thief, in 2003.

This, also, I had not known:

Radiohead, along with the Beatles, are one of the few big name acts whose work is not available on Apple’s iTunes Store. In Radiohead’s case, it’s because the band is opposed to selling individual album tracks.

The radical shift shows how some in the music industry are intent on finding new ways of tackling declining sales caused by rampant illegal downloading and file sharing.

Another British group, the Charlatans, will this later this month offer their new single You Cross My Path as a free download. The group intends to follow this up by offering a second free single and, later, a free album as a download.

The most exciting part, of course, is that I get a new Radiohead album in barely more than a week. It is so exciting I would shoot Seymour Glass myself, I’m so happy.

About that public money for water infrastructure

Oh, for Cliff’s sake.

An election-year increase in spending from the Government’s $1.6 billion Water Smart Australia Program – set aside to cover large-scale water infrastructure projects – has drained it nearly dry, despite it being meant to last until 2010.

What is it that Billy Bragg sings, about putting smart bombs in the hands of dumb people? Who know water programmes could go the same way?

Conceived of by the Government during the 2004 election as a way to appeal to green and rural voters, the fund had been criticised for being underspent. But the dynamics of another election year have opened the eyes of both sides of politics to its pork-barrelling opportunities.

Government spending from the fund this year doubles total spending in previous years of $500 million.

Labor, without rejecting any of the Government’s projects, has promised an additional sum of nearly $400 million from the fund, also mostly targeted at marginal seats. But with the Government’s spending spree leaving just $81 million in the water kitty, Labor would have to fund most of its promises from elsewhere if elected.

Some of the expenditure listed actually don’t sound too bad – but Eco 1 students will remember the criteria for evaluating government expenditure and intervention: does it do what it was supposed to, and does it do it as efficiently as possible? That money is gone – new/better proposals won’t be built, now.

XS Hybrid

You will, having seen shots of DMZ, Transmetropolitan and Ohikkoshi (which I think I’ve mentioned, but can’t find), not be surprised that I read manga. I have a weird thing with books, though – I can’t buy one. Especially if it’s the first one. Manga is read much too quickly, it’s like buying only the first two chapters of a book.

Fortunately, the second volume of XS Hybrid was just released! Meaning, I can, after having so long been impressed by the first, as I returned it to the shelf, read it.

My scan is poor (and I do need to keep half an eye out for raised hands, so I can’t deal with Photoshop and supervise an exam), but the art and chases are very nicely put-together. From the publishers:

In a strange future where gifted, “hybrid” humans police the planet, Mina is a likeable tomboy with growing psychic powers. When a young boy falls into a coma after gazing into her eyes, it’s clear that there’s more to Mina than her pretty looks. This young boy, Hinchang, grows up to be quite a daredevil, and his awkward, secret love for Mina fuels his protective fire when mysterious men arrive, bringing the violence of the “hybrid” world with them!

Don’t play logic games with undergraduates

Exam blogging!

If/when you put together multiple-choice questions, don’t make e) none of the above a logically inconsistent choice (i.e. don’t use it when d) says none of the above are correct, either).

They will be confused as hell. You’ll have to stop the entire exam to explain the logical inconsistency, they’ll look at you like you’re either crazy or an asshole, or a crazy asshole, and it won’t be as funny.

The fact that they didn’t get it will be funny, but only later – and not to your students, probably, ever.

Student loans, household wealth and the macroeconomy

Busy day. Rather an interesting AP story, via the Huffington Post, concerning student loans:

The near doubling in the cost of a college degree the past decade has produced an explosion in high-priced student loans that could haunt the U.S. economy for years.

While scholarship, grant money and government-backed student loans – whose interest rates are capped – have taken up some of the slack, many families and individual students have turned to private loans, which carry fees and interest rates that are often variable and up to 20 percent.

Many in the next generation of workers will be so debt-burdened they will have to delay home purchases, limit vacations, even eat out less to pay loans off on time.

So far, so usually-the-problem. The impact of student loans on individuals is not important: they are, by-and-large, worth the investment. Moreover, why in hell should most of the economy feel sorry for graduates who can’t go on vacation, buy a home or eat out often. E.g.:

“I could never buy a house. I can’t travel; I can’t do anything,” she said. “I feel like a prisoner.”

Or

A legal aid worker, Cole said she may need to get a job at a law firm, “doing something that I’m not real dedicated to, just for the sake of being able to live.”

I have about 4 entire boroughs of New York City that think you should shut up. Try being poor. Being poor is to be a prisoner (and I mean poor and with no prospects or education. I mean being a poor that you will stay). Complaining about having to get a job at a law firm – a job few enough poor people would ever land – is … I don’t know. Something.

In this I am, sorry to say, serious: people are not sympathetic to somebody whose investment in their own human capital (a) was one not even offered to most/many people, and (b) will serve them, their children, etc. very well. I am sympathetic, certainly, to those I know, whether because they have that burden or their children do. However, people make that investment, and will usually benefit from it in the long run (I’ll get to the unfair part – sorry, Dave – in a moment).

Here is the important part, though, and one that the AP writer handles quite well, amongst the anecdotes:

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said many graduates who borrowed owe as much if not more than most homeowners owe on mortgages. Unlike mortgages with clear consumer disclosure requirements _ even from nonbank lenders, private lending is “the Wild West of the student loan industry,” he said in a telephone interview.

…

The student loan-backed securities market has yet to suffer noticeable effects of a global credit squeeze that was triggered this summer by a mortgage meltdown of borrowers with risky credit.

“Once the economy starts to slow, you’re going to see a large increase of these people in bankruptcy court,” said Robert Manning, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology who has written about college students and credit cards.

A 2005 change to bankruptcy law puts private student loans on par with child support and alimony payments: Lenders can garnish wages if someone doesn’t pay.

Remember the rule(s) of the macroeconomy:

Aggregate Demand = Consumption + Investment + Government Expenditure + Net Exports

Consumption is a function of, amongst other things, wealth. Household wealth (equity); savings/investments; inflation, interest rates and future expectations of wealth.

I.e., attack more and more of post-graduation wages, and you strip serious purchasing power from those who should, usually, have the highest disposable incomes. Keep them from the housing ladder and you strip wealth, against which they would purchase durable goods, invest, send their kids to college, etc.

Add these up and you get a generation either (i) consuming significantly less, or (ii) maybe only a little less, but creating enormous credit/debt problems, both for themselves, our banking sectors and our macroeconomy’s exposure to foreign markets via that debt.

Most importantly, though, you decrease, significantly (potentially) Consumption (70% of GDP) and Investment (16%) – probably government revenues, too (19%).

There is a question as to the scale of this problem:

Of all of that only, really, the increase in the private loans is the worry (the government-backed loans ought to remain a good fit for the argument of investments in human capital paying off). Is USD15bn a problem?

For the tuition, meh. Complain to the Federal Reserve – they’re the dicks going around insisting shit isn’t costing more.

Getting back to ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’:

Meanwhile, complaints about marketing of private loans – like ads promising to approve loans worth $50,000 in just minutes – are on the rise. The complaints have made their way to lawmakers, who see a need to regulate the highly profitable and diverse group of companies and the loans they make to college students.

In August, the Senate Banking Committee approved a bill that would mandate clearer disclosure of rates and terms on private student loans. The bill also would require a 30-day comparison shopping period after loan approval, during which time the offer terms could not be altered.

Nothing a little intelligent regulation (you know, government) can’t fix. Remind me, again, who was the most involved in getting that Bankruptcy legislation passed? Exactly. We are getting the government we deserve. We watch Fox news while politicans sell us out to the biggest K on the street, this will be the consequence. Oh, for the BBC!

There is, as well, something more broad still – call it social capital: the balance, and the sum, and the distribution, of all individual human capital. That, too, is at risk. The idea that we’ve mortgaged tomorrow’s generations for the immediate gratification of today’s is not empty rhetoric.

“Should private student loans suffer the same sort of failure as (subprime) mortgages, as students graduate or drop out and find themselves unable to pay, we will do serious damage not only to the lives of many students but also to the economic and social fabric of our country that depends on college graduates for its strength,” said Luke Swarthout at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Ultimately my argument is that newspapers need to stop going all ‘human interest’ about this. We will get either big loans attached to people whose ultimate wealth and success is highly likely, or people with whose investment decision-making most people will not be sympathetic. This problem needs to be explained properly. The economics of it, and the consequences, are not difficult concepts. By trying to make it more personal, these articles just diminish the problem.