Thursday, November 29, 2012

Recent Reading


Recent reading, counter-intuitive edition.

Renting versus buying music: the economics of Spotify and iTunes. Is Spotify better for artists than they think? Numbers alertthere are a lot of them in this piece—but I rarely see this much good detail in any business writing, let alone a piece on the music industry.

Want your kids to be smarter? Move them to a country with no oil. The entirely compelling but wack connection between education and natural resources. From Tom Friedman who's almost always worth reading. (Beirut to Jerusalem, his book on the Middle East, is still the best resource I know for understanding what's going on there today.)

"It is not clear that moving around large and largely empty vehicles is much of an improvement over moving around smaller ones. In fact, it may be worse." Why mass transit isn't necessarily more fuel efficient.


1 comment:

Liskill said...

Maybe I'm just out of the green loophole, but having done of bit of research on regional transit issues in Metro Detroit, energy efficiency does not seem to be a primary motivating factor. Rather, mobility/access, job creation, business growth and general connectedness are the more heavily emphasized arguments for mass transit. Morris has interesting theories, but they are so narrowly focused as to be misleading in terms of the overall value of mass transit. GO MASS TRANSIT! heh.