The decline of books

From the Washington Post:

In the past three months, Amazon has sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, the company said. In July, sales of e-books accelerated to 180 sold for every 100 hardcover versions. Kindle book sales this year have also exceeded broader e-book sales growth, pegged by the Association of American Publishers at 207 percent through May, Amazon said.

Who is best for the super rich?

A blog on Vanity Fair reports that Obama is losing his support among the super rich. A lot of people do not realize that he had so much support among those of great wealth in the first place.

By working his charm and displaying certain touches of upper-class refinement, Obama persuaded the super rich to embrace his liberal vision for America.

The conventional wisdom is that the super rich are Republican because that is in their economic interest. After all, the Democrats want tax the rich in order to redistribute income.

However, what the rich want even more than increased wealth is security in their relative standing, and they do not get that from free markets. Free markets promote social mobility, allowing poor people to rise and rich people to fall. A system more favorable to the already-rich is crony capitalism. Moreover, a tax system that features high marginal income tax rates may also be in the interests of the very rich because it can reduce social mobility. High marginal tax rates on income make it more difficult for new people to rise to great wealth, but because the tax is on income and not wealth, it does not threaten the economic position of the already-wealthy. Crony capitalism is very popular in much of the world, and one of its charms for the elite is that it promotes a static social order.

So maybe the super rich were not the rubes that the Vanity Fair piece implicitly suggests they were. Maybe they were voting their economic interest by voting for Obama, crony capitalism, and high marginal income taxes. Why then the disillusionment? The piece is a bit unclear, but hints that the super rich are disappointed with Obama's liberalism. I think this paragraph may tell more:

And more to the point, his demeanor is that of a New England elite; he has the ease and confidence of someone who is well-to-do, and he is buttressed by a long list of friends in high places. Which explains how he initially won the allegiance of the rich so easily. It also didn’t hurt that his predecessor in the Oval Office, George W. Bush, a bona-fide member of the American aristocracy and a conservative Republican, had disappointed so many patrician believers with his problematic presidency.

It may not be the leftism but rather the incompetence of the present administration that makes it uncool to be identified with it.

The Natural Survival of Work

From The Natural Survival of Work: Job Creation and Job Destruction in a Growing Economy:

In the United States, every year, 21.5 million jobs disappear. ... If you look at it on a daily basis, the extent of the carnage is striking: every working day, the United States loses 90,000 jobs.... [F]ortunately, this perspective only tells half the story...every day, the United States creates 90,000 jobs....

Post Office volume dropping

Also found on Carpe Diem, a link to a report that mail volume of the U.S. post office is dropping rather fast. Who needs the post office when we have e-mail and cell phones?

Farewell, Geocities

A few weeks ago I received the following e-mail from Yahoo:

Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,

We're writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

I checked quantcast.com to see how much traffic it got, and it was still getting almost 12 million visits from the U.S., down about 3 million from six months ago, but still big enough to rank as 58th biggest site. It is remarkable that yahoo was not able to make money on that much traffic, but that may say a lot about why yahoo has not done well.

A comment on the closing at techcrunch.com:

There are plenty of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad, as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Webs, Jimdo, Snapages, Weebly, and countless more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator.

Geocities was founded in 1995 Yahoo purchased it in 1999 for several billion--the number differed. Wikipedia has a good history of the site.

A PC World blog was rather snarky, but pointed to the problems the site had:

GeoCities grew weaker by the month. The proliferation of low-cost hosting options, combined with the increasing popularity of social network-style services in place of personal home pages, only contributed to its demise.

GeoCities is survived by two cousins, Angelfire and Tripod, along with an uncle, Jeeves. All three are believed to be terminally ill.

Others will follow, including, in time, this site. I have (soon had) a page there, along with pages at tripod and angelfire. Since angelfire and tripod put google ads on the pages, they may actually be making some money.

Quote of the day?

If I did a quote of the day, this would be one that would make it:

Obama and his team seem sharply opposed to the view that creative destruction is a valuable economic force. They seem happy with what might be called destructive destruction--the obliteration of value and wealth without any resulting positive change.

Death of creative destruction?

Is entrepreneurship dying? This opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal by Michael Malone says it is being strangled with government regulation and new accounting rules.