The viatical (or life settlements) market is also fraught with problems in the U.S., as per this Chicago Tribune article.

Part of the problem is that it's unclear whether they're insurance products (which are generally regulated by the states) or investment products (which the SEC would have jurisdiction over).

Tell me about it!

When you come down to it, insurance is basically regulated gambling on the likelihood of disasters rather than the outcome of sporting events. And gambling tends to attract people with a whole range of interesting psychological quirks ...

Have you seen that Dirty Harry movie from the 80s, THE DEAD POOL? Where people bet on the likelihood of celebrities dying... does this sort of business exist today??

-A.R.Yngve
http://yngve.bravehost.com

MurderInc Investment Partners wouldn't need to rub anyone out to profit from this, which may invalidate the insurance in any case. All they need is one FDA administrator with a gambling problem, a carefully timed leak about a promising cure and their massively short position pays off handsomely.

This isn't exactly news; I believe that the trade in life policies goes back as far as the outbreak of AIDS, if not further. I believe that at least one person got famously rich on buying up policies from AIDS sufferers (Those whose cover predated the disease and were still covered.)

If I were to channel Mike Holmes I would have to point out that the significant benefit to the seller of the policy is that they get the money before they die. Their heirs get screwed, but the seller gets the cash to make their last days more comfortable.

Hmm - Charlie, you need to spend some time checking out the rather random beginnings of life insurance (for the rich) and friednly societies (for the poor) in the C18th and C19th respectively. I can't think of any immediately gripping references offhand, but there must be some great Murder Ltd plotlines in there, suitably pumped up.

See also Terry Pratchett's version of insurance and the fire brigade.

I personally know a pioneer in this field. A guy named Paul Moe offered my band a management contract in 80's, so he began his career as a rock promoter/manager wanna be. Talk about weird personality quirks!

While trying to help a close friend who was dying of AIDS cash in his life insurance he developed a way to do these deals with big financial investors. Now he's CEO of Living Benefits Financial Services LLC in Wayzata, Minnesota. They plan to buy nearly a billion USD in life insurance policies in the next year! Blood money is big business!

Check this out, he says the toughest problem for his industry was/is not the AIDS drugs shakeout, but the the increasing competition from other companies copying their approach (people still die of many other nasty things in predictable ways). Imagine fielding offers and taking the highest bidder for your Stage III Melanoma. How long before we have online bookmaking for what's about to kill ya.

Creepy, man.

Just reading the executive summary is just _jolly_. Time to run it past my former boss the PhD in economics.

Charlie, you're obviously sick and thus not thinking clearly. Deficits? Who cares? "Deficits don't matter" was the quote a while back from Dick Cheney as I recall. You gotta have faith in the guys running the US, they don't make mistakes in economics any more than they do in foreign policy or intelligence matters. Faith-based economics, it's the latest thing. Even better than supply-side economics, honest.

Ah, suddenly I'm feeling quite ill. I may be coming down with the flu or something...

This has been building for some time. The Japanese ceased bailing a few months back, China will hopefully do likewise soon.

The current mismatch in economic power between the First world and the developing world is non-sustainable - we're going to lose our priveliged position where we can buy DVD players for 5 hours of the minimum wage, and it'll be a good thing, because it'll mean that the rest of the world won't be starving quite so much.

Welcome to the slightly-more-evenly-distributed future.

I don't see the logic in a suffering U.S. economy being good news for anyone starving in the third world. It's not as though they were living in luxury until Nike came along and offered them jobs at sweatshops.

Likewise, China is growing. While there may be problems related to defense and competition for oil markets, I still believe it's an economically good thing for the U.S. when other people prosper.

Edited by author 11-23-2004 03:18 AM
Randy,

The problem is that the US has acheived this using the following offer. Tell you what China we'll buy $10b of goods from you if you lend us $5b towards the price of them.

Thats not a deal that can last forever at some point down the line that $5b has to be paid for. As the dollar is the currency the loan is in the real question is how do you reduce the size of the loan to ensure that it remains payable. The options now are weaken the dollar to make Chinese goods more expensive and try and reintroduce inflation so that that $5bn loan starts looking like a $2bn loan.

Ben,

I'd have just one minor quibble: Most of them bought those bonds because they thought it was a good deal at the time, irrespective of whether I was buying shirts from them.

In any case, I wasn't trying to argue that the debt wasn't a bad thing, but rather, that a U.S. downturn was not a good thing for the rest of the world.

And "rest of the world" excludes the world's politicians.

Trying for the long-term perspective ...

Back some time in 2001/2002, I was struck by the parallels between the USA's situation and that of the UK in 1901/02. Now I'm beginning to think we're seeing a replay of history -- with specific reference to the rise and fall of empires -- at some multiple of realtime, by a bored god with one finger on the fast-forward button and an urge to deliver a vicious object lesson along the lines of "they who do not study history are doomed to repeat it".

Sic transit gloria PNAC.

"they who do not study history are doomed to repeat it" is a slogan that's much more interesting for people who aren't in the stewpot, let me tell you. It's fun (if, by fun, you mean horrible) watching my savings plunge in value this last year. But it will make pretty wallpaper when US$1 == ¥1

On the more micro side of markets, do you think the value of signed copies of Charlie's stuff will go up if he dies soon? Will he be "gifted genius tragically struck down in prime" or "obscure author who sunk without trace"?

I mean, I have a Christmas to finance and I wanna know if I should wish better health to our host or not...

Charlie,

That's an interesting analogy but I don't think it's that bad. The end of the British Empire was as much an end of all empires and mercantilism as anything else. I could be wrong but I'm not aware that the price of tea had changed radically since losing India.

It looks to me like Britain does very well. You still have a great navy that might have remained the greatest if not for the fact that it sails in the shadow of an even more powerful ally.


Tony,

You may as well wish Charlie well as he has enough friends/rivals to ghost write in his stead. And perhaps the thought of mis-penned sequels will give him the will to resist.

I've wanted to have a blog post entitled "Still ill" for ages, and now you've gone and done it.
The irony is, I am currently not well, but I would've had to post a precedent-post first, describing my not-wellness, and then a follow-up after a suitable amount of time. Which would imply actually being ill for such an amount of time, and I'm not sure it's worth it just for the sake of homage.

Well on the "If Rome is burning, bring sausages for barbecue" front I would recommend that our american participants keep their liabilities in fixed-interest dollar-denominated debt and their assets in, well, anything else. In particular I would recommend investing in eastern europe. Estonia looks good. That way if/when the dollar crashes your debts are much reduced, while the value of your assets rises. This is naturally not very helpful for Stross, as his US publishers are very unlikely to agree to pay him in euros or pounds >:-)

Thomas is quite correct. I'm especially annoyed that the UK publishing market is in recession right now, so most of my novels are only selling in the US (and non-English markets) -- the UK is potentially a lifeboat for me (it's the second most lucrative SF market) but it's shipping water. Which means about 70% of my income is currently dependent on the US dollar ...

Randy: I maintain that the USA is an empire; it's British Empire 2.0, and the first one to operate on a planetary scale. However, for ideological and historical reasons it's deeply politically incorrect in America to talk of the USA as an imperial power (despite the precedents going back over a century -- The Phillipines, anyone?) And the persistent failure to address the systemic failings of the US hegemony in terms of its status as an imperial power is one of the main causes of the current quagmire.

(If anything we owe the PNAC neocon hawks quite a bit, simply for revealing the emperor's underwear to the world --and making it quite clear that even if the "E" word was not to be spoken in public, it was still in mind.)

Tony: if you kill me now, I'll never get to write a book and dedicate it to you :)

Charlie, It's fine to think that way. My point was only to ponder on your previous post, and note that the the end of Empire 1.0 did not result in a fatal collapse of the British economy.

Nor did it bring an end to national responsibility. You were on the leading edge in WWI and WWII, and although you had help in both of them, you had sufficient strength to hold your own when the going got tough.

I think we'll do fine in the long run (not counting WMD incidents down the road).

Randy,

My feeling is that America is not Britain circa 1901 but Britain circa 1973 (prior to the oil crisis). Until there is a global equivalent to America circa 1901 I don't really think that America has problems along those lines. Now America circa 1928 seems to be a popular comment both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley seem very bearish http://business.bostonherald.com/businessN...d=55356&format=text Steve for the Morgan Stanley bit.

As for you Charlie I usually buy whichever edition arrives first in stock. You could have ready cash (possible even Scottish notes) if you sell me proof copies.

Edited by author 11-25-2004 10:19 AM
Ben -- That's certainly something to worry about, and it fits in with Charlie's concerns. It's really something for the world to worry about. We in the U.S. are addicted to debt, but everybody else is addicted to U.S. markets. If we fall, Asia's going to fall hard, and probably Europe as well.

And by "fall", I don't mean as in headed into a depression. 1929 didn't need to lead to the Great Depression. It was made worse by bad Fed policy and stupid politicians. People barely remember 1987.

Edited by author 11-25-2004 10:38 AM
Two things I would add.

1) I think some parts of Asia will be fine. China will keep pegged to the dollar so the idea that devaluation will increase exports will at best be a small gain. The idea of outsourcing to India will probably die a death tho.

2) The solution used in 87 was to borrow and allow inflation to ramp up. The first option is not really possible and the second could well be self fulfilling thanks to the rising cost of raw materials a deflating dollar will create.

The rest of the Far East, Europe and to a less extent Europe is going to have an interesting time. Especially as I'm starting to thank that while everyone is treating the economy as a game of chess, China seems to be playing Go.

Finally, what are you doing here. Isn't it Thanksgiving, a time from family, food and limbering up for the sales tomorrow?

Actually I'm not all that worried about europe. One of the upsides to the way the european economy is organised is that it is pretty shock-resistant. Finland recovered right damm quick from both the collapse of the sovjet union and the devaluation in Russia. despite a huge amount of trade going that way - And really, as things stand we're shipping stuff to the US and being paid in IOU's backed by the Bank of China. Which is just plain silly. Re-adjusting the terms of trade so that things are more equitable is supposed to be a bad thing for europe? Frankly, I don't see it.
The Euro will go up, the ECB will probably drop interest rates even further, which, well, wouldn't suck, and more capital will be invested here which really won't suck.

Well, if you guys aren't worried about Europe then I'm not going to argue on that point. A lot can happen on the downslope, and it wouldn't be the first time the bears were wrong anyway.

Since Ben mentions India, here's a twist:
"The BBC reports that quite a few young European tourists stick around in India to work for eSolutions companies who contract outsourced work from European companies. The salaries are mediocre, but you get free housing, great food, snacks ŕ volonté and a free taxi ride to work each morning."
http://it.slashdot.org/it/04/11/25/1418248...=98&tid=187&tid=218

And yes, today is Thanksgiving. And yes, tomorrow is the biggest shopping day of the year. That's when millions of Americans buy useless toys with money we borrowed from you nice folks overseas, and that we fully intend to pay back with devalued money.

Life is interesting. :)

Edited by author 11-26-2004 09:32 PM
I'll continue to be worried about Europe's economies in the medium term until and unless I see some actual attempts to come to grips with what the rapidly shifting (for the worse) demographics in most of the continent. Right now it looks to me like Europe has its head in the sand on that score in exactly the same way that the USA is ignoring the debt problem.


I've no confidence in either economy, medium term.

I think the demographic problem will solve itself in due course.

Remember, a growing population is also an economic drag; children cost a hell of a lot of money to raise and educate to the standard required by a developed nation for its work force. (Think £120,000 and 22 years, for a basic graduate-level education and upbringing.) Those who see the USA's growing population as a panacaea for the social security system probably aren't paying enough attention to the implications of the No Child Left Behind nonsense (education privatization? What the hell do they think they're doing, trying to third-worldize the USA academically?!?). Moreover, when you look at demographic breakdowns of the US population, how to put it ... most of the growth is in the hispanic and other immigrant sectors, not the third-generation or older population. There's alarmism among the American right about the idea of Moslems in Europe breeding like flies and taking over the EU -- racist overtones entirely intentional, as that's basically what it boils down to -- which just goes to prove the point of the old proverb about motes and beams in eyes.

The answer to social security being an issue is to raise the retirement age in step with increases in life expectancy. And if you're really worried about population decline, to look into the Japanese robotics boom targeted at the same problem.

The difference in my view, Charlie, is that the United States has a long history of being a nation of immigrants. It's tre that much of the growth is due to Hispanic immigrants, but *that's nothing new* for the USA. Except for some throwbacks we like it that way. Most of Europe has no experience with that sort of mass assimilation.

I should also point out that the fertility rate for non-Hispanics in the USA is around 1.9, which is only very slightly below replacement. That's nothing like the numbers around 1.2 we're seeing in Japan and parts of Europe. Hispanic immigrants aren't replacing non-Hispanics, they're simply adding to the cultural mix.

I agree the demographic problem will solve itself in due course, which is why I specified "medium-term". It hardly matters to an investor if the demographics problem solves itself in 60 or 70 years if all of their money goes POOF in 25 because European economies collapse under the strain of supporting populations where 2/3 of the country is elderly and probably a third is sick.

Interestingly, I mentioned the Japanese robotics boom recently in RASFF in just this context. Japan will not consider mass immigration for cultural reasons. It just won't happen. So it's a race between their aging population and their advances in robotic technology.

I don't think they're quite going to make it, and things will probably get kinda ugly.

The difference in my view, Charlie, is that the United States has a long history of being a nation of immigrants. It's tre that much of the growth is due to Hispanic immigrants, but *that's nothing new* for the USA. Except for some throwbacks we like it that way. Most of Europe has no experience with that sort of mass assimilation.

This is just not true.

In France, something like 40% of the population have non-French people among their grandparents. France has been explicitly assimilating immigrants for centuries: what's interesting is that the assimilationist policies weren't applied in the 1960's/70's and subsequently to the North African immigrant population. In the UK, a rather more insular country, you've got people like me (only the second generation of my family to be born here -- yes, two of my grandparents were not born in the UK).

And I don't give much credit to the fertility rate figures that are being bandied around. You can't assess fertility rates as a running figure, you can only assess the fertility rate for a cohort of females once they hit menopause. A low fertility rate at a given time might mean that women aren't having children ... or it might mean that the age at which they start families is simply rising. I'm seeing a number of first-time mothers in their late thirties/early forties around here, something that would have contributed to low observable fertility rates a couple of years ago and have been socially inexplicable a decade or more ago.

Finally, you can't generalize about a place as big as the EU. The figure of 1.2 children/woman is, I think, specific to Italy, and the local conditions differ radically from those elsewhere. If you sampled Iowa or Kansas, you might well draw the conclusion that the US population was shrinking -- but you'd be wrong, and for the same reason that looking at Italy and saying "the sky is falling! Europe will go extinct!" is wrong.

You're comparing apples to oranges on the immigration issue. Those 40% of French people with non-French grandparents is, save for the Muslim immigrants, mostly stuff like having a grandparent from Belgium or England or the Netherlands.

Sure, they don't share exactly the same culture, but it's hardly comparable in terms of culture clash to the waves of Latin American, Hmong, African, Japanese, Indian, etc etc etc immigrants that the USA assimilates all the time. Really... I've been all over Europe, and the differences between a Parisian and a guy from Florence pale in comparison between somebody from New York and somebody from Jakarta or Lima or Port-aux-Prince. Immigration in most of Europe is, historically, simply not comparable to an immigrant nation like the USA. That's not some sort of moral judgment, it's just being realistic in terms of experience with immigration.

And the reason you can look at the fertility rates as a trend (not a running figure) is because in most of Europe they've been constant for two full *consecutive* cohorts. Roughly 35-40 years. It's possible, I guess, that women will suddenly decide all over Europe that they want lots of kids, but it didn't happen with their mothers nor with their grandmothers. You can't wave away that trend by saying that current TFR isn't necessarily a predictor of future TFR. It isn't, but the *trend* is.

You can generalize about a place as big as Europe in this instance when there isn't a single European country save Muslim Albania (tiny) with a TFR at replacement or higher. That's not generalizing, it's the whole continent! It's not just Italy with a 1.2 TFR, Spain, Russia, and a couple of other places are that low. Lots of other nations (including the big ones like Germany and the U.K.) are in the 1.5-1.6 range, still significantly under replacement.

I agree that if you sampled Iowa and Kansas you might get an inaccurate picture, but if you sampled ALL FIFTY states you sure wouldn't. I'm not generalizing, I've seen the numbers for every nation in Europe, and like I said, except for Albania they're all negative.

I don't think Europe will go extinct, but (to bring us back to where the thread started) I think most of Europe's economies are in no better and quite possibly a lot worse shape than the USA in the medium term.

European TFR stats are wildly misleading because european women have been having their kids later than their mothers did, which looks a lot *like* a fertility drop but really isn't - The generation of french women born in 1960 ended up having an average of 2.25 children each, which is well above replacement. In fact it is more children than american women have. France is bit of an outlier, but TFR stats understate european fertility across the board.

Returning to the dollar, I just did a good chunck of my holiday shopping on the US version of amazon, because the total cost, even with the ridiculus shipping charge, (4.99 dollar/book. Eeck!) was cheaper than shopping at the UK version. In one case the US hardcover was cheaper than the UK paperback even. Also. I didn't have enough patience to wait for the UK edition of "the family trade". Sorry about that.

Thomas -- on current form there won't be a UK edition of "The Family Trade". The British fantasy market is in heavy recession (I've heard of established, well-known writers looking for day jobs); moreover British publishers invariably prefer to buy British authors so they can grab world rights and re-sell the book in the USA. I'm effectively a first-time American author, for market purposes in the UK, so my chances of selling the books over here are zilch (until the market recovers in a few years -- British publishing runs on a five year stop/go cycle, has done for decades).

Luckily I got my SF novels into print before the industry went into recession, and Orbit are sufficiently gung-ho about them that they've bought the next couple as well (with an increased advance! In a recession!). So the fantasy series -- and hopefully the Laundry books -- might appear in the UK when the climate improves, but not for at least a couple of years.

(Which is ironic, because the Laundry books are far and away my most "British" work.)

Even in industries where the primary producers do have to maintain stocks -- farming, for instance, where the harvest might run for 2 or 3 weeka, and grain might be stored on farm for most of the year -- the rest of the chain of production and distribution is just as brittle. And, because the producers aren't really paid enough to cover the storage costs, and EU policy is encouraging earlier sale and delivery, there's a lot of grain consumption depending on seasonal imports.

So in summer the European stock of grain may be practically nonexistent.

And this is an industry where year on year global supply variations, and variations in harvest dates, are around the same size as the "carry-over", the world's reserve.

I've known a 4-week variation in harvest date between consecutive years. At least that's partly hidden by variations between countries, but it pusts the grain mountains of legend in some perspective.

But, without oil, even if fertiliser and pesticides were not affected, aropund half the farmland would have to be used to produce the farm's fuel. If anyone wants to check on this, look in uk.business.agriculture, good for farming, history, and quantum mechanics.

(You thought I was joking?)

I need to go and read some more on the collapse of complex civilizations
You've read, I guess, Jared Diamond's excellent books Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed ...

Wasn't the idea of advanced, complex civilizations being brought down because their hyper-efficiency was very brittle part of the background to _A Deepness in the Sky_? It's been a number of years, but IIRC that was one of the problems Pham Nuwen thought the focused could be used to prevent.

The brittleness which Mr. Stross correctly points to in Just In Time systems is due to a paradox in the attempts to mathematize Occam's razor. I'll spare you 23,000 words I've written this past week on the matter, but cut to the chase. Given a competing set of analytical models of, say, a commodities market such as Oil, the one which gives the best fit to past data is generally NOT the one that gives the best prediction of future data. There is a tradeoff between prediction and retrodiction. The more comfortable the policy-making apparatus becomes with the status quo, the more they risk collapsing when conditions do not meet expectations. Heteroskedacity is the technical name given the the situation where we are happy with our parameters that define a random system (such as a market) and then these parameters suddenly change. This is far more general than bubbles and how they burst. As we approach the singularity, all models up to a given degree of complexity fail. That degree of complexity heads towards infinity. I've been discussing this for some time with Vernor Vinge; David Bilek is right to cite him. Readers don't need to do the math, but they can trust that Vinge et al have gotten it right, ever since Ulam named and predicted the singularity. If it was not oil, it would be something else; remember the monetary basis in Blish's Cities in Flight?

Sumitomo lost a resin plant in the eighties. Screwed up the DRAM business because it made eighty percent of the low alpha emission resin (you don't want to know) so the DRAM makers had to switch from 1 megabit to 4 megabit chips to stretch out the DRAM and there was both higher prices and lower profits at once.
Something like that can happen again, but not in the semiconductor business because they learned their lesson and won't get caught like that again.

The question is, how many industries and organizations learned their lessons from Katrina and Rita? Form surveying the media, none.
I suspect one more big disaster and the phrase "just in time inventory" will become a curse on everyone's lips.

" [...] the move by the big US oil companies to shut excess oil refinery capacity in the 1990s and move to a just in time model has given us the first real large-scale demonstration that just-in-time logistic systems are very brittle and can be broken by relatively predictable spikes in demand or once-a-decade problems."

9/11 demonstrated that to every company relying on moving stuff across the US/Canadian border quickly. Of course, that complication probably didn't make the world press.

I could talk/write for ever about the movement of service provision over the last 20 years or so, but I think you go into such a discussion ignoring the effect of stock markets at the peril of coming to a realistic conclusion.

As someone who used to be there and do investment, as well as offshore banking, I see no utility in stock markets. They are institutions for gambling on second hand shares using other people's money, and the insiders ALWAYS take their handful off the top (spot the music quote), and they always have more than one place to go (there's another), while their brothers and their cousins . . . oh, stop, this is getting silly . . . in government protect them because they are given a little taste, thereby binding them into the conspiracy ('cos that's what it is) And these are the same men in expensive suits who demand ever increasing profits from the people who actually make things and provide services people want so the share price can be kept up (the thrust behind the just in time philosophy)

Want an illustriation. Worldcon (such an appropriate term, 'cos that's what it was once the moneymen and the share options took over) and Enron. The two biggest thefts of all time (other than the theft of the North American continent, but that's a whole other can of worms) The collapse of the American stockmarket caused by the collapse of 2 - count them 2 - companies that didn't amount to very much at all in the 'real' world of telecommunications is what has sharpened the minds of politicians all over the world, who now recognise the term 'pension crisis'. Even Dubya thinks its real, so it must be. Think back. Which notable politician freely admitted shredding documents vital to the Enron investigation? Dick Cheney. He of Halliburton. Dubya's minder. You think he invaded Iraq to get rid of a dictator? You must be simple. Think of the special prosecutors they sicced on the last guy for nothing at all, and here you have involvement in the biggest theft of all time that has taken money out of the pockets of millions (and some of them must have been registered Republican voters), but who will feel the collar of the Vice (such an appropriate word) President when the company is at war.

Rant over.

Martyn: I resent you associating the name of an innocent science fiction convention with that bunch of scam artists!

So how'd you go about re-arranging capitalism to work better -- ban public share issues but permit companies to issue interest-bearing bonds to raise capital?

Me, I'm beginning to think that the pursuit of efficiency as a social goal is not only orthogonal to the pursuit of happiness -- it may be actively detrimental. But that's another argument.

Students should be allowed to sell Futures in their career earnings, to finance education and personal infrastructure. If they do well, they can buy back shares in their own futures. Otherwise, they remain answerable to their stockholders. This gets government out of the education business, which they have botched in many countries. I wrote a draft SF story about a grad student on the moon doing crummy work at the behest of her stockholders. I believe in stock markets, for very complicated reasons, yet: "trust, but verify."

... And I believe in unlimited higher education, free at the point of delivery, which is how the UK system used to work before Thatcher sodomized it. (Hint: with progressive income tax, and higher earnings for graduates, they eventually pay for it.)

Edited by author 10-09-2005 01:21 PM
Students should be allowed to sell Futures in their career earnings
All sorts of weird problems and possibilities arise from this. First, do you really mean "futures"? More likely you mean the net present value of future expected income and cumulative asset value of the individual. This gives you a nice figure to conjure with. Musicians like David Bowie and Rod Stewart have created a new class of bond, the "Bowie Bond" (http://www.bowiewonderworld.com/bowienews/news0399.htm), but these bonds commoditise the known value of an existing back catalogue. Closer to the concept is some kind of swap, but the problem here is that pricing swaps relies on having a very tight (and calculable) arbitrage relationship with the forward and forward forward markets (or having a proxy equivalent which you can calculate forward/forward forward rates from, like FRAs for interest rate/currency swaps), something which I can't quite see how you'd construct around an individual's future income.

I mostly agree with Mr. Stross and daen. First, universal free public primary education was a triumph specifically of the Scottish Enlightenment, which other countries following that lead in mutated ways. Second, not all social evolution is progress, with the Stross example being on-target, and the American paradox of the best colleges being all but 3 of the top 20 worldwide by one recent metric, while the mean American higher education quality has plummeted towards bankruptcy-equivalent. Third, I have seen at least the USA figures for the expected increase in future earnings for given levels of higher education. Fourth, some specific schools actually publish the figures for their own alumni. Fifth, to the extent that there is a difference between a prior expected future income and Bayesian expectation given attainment of a given degree and/or from a particular institution, there should be room for arbitrage. Sixth: the present value argument is absolutely correct. Seventh: the David Bowie and Rod Stewart examples were known to me; I am wondering how to generalize this to, say, winners of prizes that are good predictors of future Nobel prizes, or the MacArthur fellowships, or the Field Medal. Eighth, how to combine Black-Scholes with social network theory? Ninth, Mr.Stross is one one the leading explorers of the dotcom business model paradigm to futurism, science fiction, and Fantasy, and I appreciate his indulgence in allowing this subthread.

I like your topic. It is a good one. Keep up the good work. Visit allegra d side effects webpage devoted to allegra d side effects. actos juridicos webpage devoted to actos juridicos. .

Hello moder!