I've been sick, so maybe this only amuses me, and if so, well, sorry. But this weekend, I came across news that spam was up, spam was down, spam was lucrative (enough), and divine intervention as evidenced by a seemingly unironic collocation of sentences from the AP.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Wednesday she would consider serving in the Senate if God gave her the opportunity and Alaskans wanted her to take the job. The state's senior senator, Republican Ted Stevens, fell behind as the count resumed in his re-election bid.

3 spam posts in one weekend? Why not?! I've often wondered abut the economics of email spam. Clearly it was making someone money, otherwise we wouldn't get nearly so much. So how much does spam make? Via Schneier, the answer is not much, but enough.

Spam is all about economics. When sending junk mail costs a dollar in paper, list rental, and postage, a marketer needs a reasonable conversion rate to make the campaign worthwhile. When sending junk mail is almost free, a one in ten million conversion rate is acceptable.

I liked this quotation, and wanted to save it for Googlesterity

"Buffett once told me there are three 'I's in every cycle. The 'innovator,' that's the first 'I.' After the innovator comes the 'imitator.' And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot."

-Theodore Forstmann, quoting Warren Buffett

Can someone, preferably, the man himself, start Michael Lewis a blog? Best known for the books Moneyball and Liar's Poker, he's also had articles/columns in The New York Times, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, Portfolio (no author page), and almost assuredly The Wall Street Journal (again, no author page). Shouldn't there be a central repository of all these articles in chronological order updated as a new one is published?

What inspired me to write this post, though, was the fact that he's popped up 4 times in my RSS in the last week, so he may as well have had a blog with its own feed.

He moved his family into the biggest mansion in New Orleans to better understand the "acceptable lust" Americans have for a bigger house. He sarcastically muses about how the former CEO of Goldman has treated his former employer since becoming Secretary of the Treasury. He looks on the bright side of economic crisis. And he's writing a book about the meltdown. Also, here's a bonus article from last year I never got around to commenting on. This one includes the quotation, “If there’s been a theme to John’s life,” says his brother Nelson, “it’s pricing tail”, though it's about figuring out what to charge for insurance against cataclysmic events that have less than a 1% chance of happening.

For bankers/Republicans who say there are no other options besides Paulson's 'clean plan', here are Cuban and Ritholtz's alternate proposals.

I'm studying economics for the first time this semester. I suppose I'm a little embarrassed that it's taken me this long, but better late than never. Our text is specifically about micro-economics and public finance.

Reading the introductory material, I can't help but notice (clearly, in print) something that I've suspected for a long time: economists think that people are robots. With the caveat that I've only read three chapters of this textbook, so far it seems to me that all of the economic theory (Pareto efficiency, welfare economics, etc) depends rather strongly on people being good little rational choice-making utility maximizers.

Thing is, I don't feel like a mechanically rational utility maximizer, and I don't think anyone else really is, either. Can someone who's studied more of this than I have point me to some readings in one of the following two categories?

1. An economist making reassuring noises that, yes, these things are only models, and as a result they're only abstractions and approximations, and only a very shallow thinkier would take all of this perfectly literally.


2. A serious thinker making a critique of rational choice and utility maximization as the underpinnings of (micro-)economics.

Thanks, smart people of the Internet!