RSS Feeds

The automatic feeds of posts from my blogs seem to have stopped working sometime around September 8, 2026 (about 17 days ago), not just between my two blogs but to other blogs where I am in their blog feed. And, this seems to be happened for other RSS feeds as well, such as Razib Khan's feed.

I know nothing about the causes of this technical problem or whether there are any solutions to it. Comments from people better informed than I am about the situation are welcome.

Posting Patterns At This Blog And Its Sister Blog

Obviously, I'm posting this at this blog than in previous years, averaging about two posts per week, which seems like a reasonable target going forward. This puts this blog on track to have the fewest number of posts since its inception in 2005 (by a wide margin), but still means it is a very active blog compared to many blogs.

Some content that would have appeared on this blog has also been shifted to quick hit posts on Facebook, in lieu of deeper analysis here, because that's quicker and easier. Not infrequently, my Facebook posts get reworked into a quick hits post or a deeper analysis of one of those posts, and conversely, sometimes posts here make their way to Facebook when I think it would be a good fit for that format.

At sister blog Dispatches From Turtle Island, I've managed to keep up the pace of roughly one post every other day that I've maintained since the inception of that blog in 2011, although my posts there have gotten a little thinner and the balance has tipped a little more towards physics from anthropology and prehistory and linguistics type posts that take more effort to write adequately.

I still do continue my practice of about fifteen years of scanning every single preprint at arXiv on astrophysics, general relativity and cosmology, HEP-experiment, HEP-lattice, and HEP-phenomenology (at least 95-98% of the time), of bookmarking the interesting papers, reading the body text of the articles whose abstracts don't tell enough of the story, and of blogging the papers that are truly interesting, as well as scanning my several regular sources for anthropology type articles daily, bookmarking them, and less often actually blogging them (less often than I'd like), and scanning some of my other sources like Science Daily and other science blogs a few times a month. Sometimes I miss a day or two when I'm busy or traveling, but when I do, I go back and add them to my review later (almost all of the time, although I sometimes miss as much as five to ten days a year when I miss too much to easily go back).

This blog has fallen off more than its sister blog, in part, because the means by which I generate ideas for it aren't as systematic.

My stack exchange posting has dropped pretty much to one to three posts a month, mostly at Law.SE but rarely at Politics.SE where I used to be a moderator (a job I've relinquished and don't miss).

I also make an occasional post at the Physics Forums, although that has dropped to maybe 10% of my previous posting rate and often involves cross posts from Dispatches From Turtle Island, or a brief comment to a discussion thread that I started to post at before taking my current job which inhibits my ability to post.

I really mourn the loss of all of the Typepad blog content (even the archival posts!). But, blogger seems to be O.K. for the indefinite future (readers, please give me a heads up if it is preparing to go off line so I can archive my posts, which are also available through Lexis Nexus which syndicates this blog for a trivial royalty of about $25 every 12-24 months), and Substack seems to be quite healthy and is the latest hot blogging platform.

Typos In Blog Posts

A rare essay about typos in blog posts, expressing views that largely mirror my own views on the topic, can be found here.

Mourning Lost Blogs

The demise of the TypePad blog hosting site has obliterated many of the blogs in my sidebar.

A Leading Blogging Platform Will Be Gone In Three Weeks

Typepad is shutting down

August 27, 2025

We have made the difficult decision to discontinue Typepad, effective September 30, 2025.

What Does This Mean for You?

After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad – including account management, blogs, and all associated content – will no longer be available. Your account and all related services will be permanently deactivated.

Please note that after this date, you will no longer be able to access or export any blog content.

What Do You Need to Do?

If you need to retain your content, please export your content before September 30, 2025. After this date, your content will no longer be accessible to you and will not be available for export.

You can find more information on exporting here.

From the Typepad website.

Typepad, together with Blogger, and Substack, is one of the leading blogging platforms that will impact countless blogs, some of which have been continually adding content for more than two decades.

U.K. To Regulate Many Online Forums Out Of Existence

I don't like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and this is worse.

This, from Techcrunch, seems like a good summary of a bad situation facing this blog: Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities.

This blog is just that: my personal blog, with comments.

Over the past two decades a lively community has evolved in the discussion threads. However, the Online Safety Act threatens to impose impossible hurdles on the continuation of open fora in the UK. The intent is officially to protect adults and children from illegal content, but ... there's no lower threshold on scale. A blog with comments is subject to exactly as much regulatory oversight as Facebook. It applies to all fora that enable people in the UK (that would be me) to communicate with other people in the UK (that's a whole bunch of you), so I can't avoid the restrictions by moving to a hosting provider in the US. Nor am I terribly keen on filing the huge amounts of paperwork necessary to identify myself as the Trust and Safety officer of an organization and arrange for commercial age verification services (that I can't in any event integrate with this ancient blogging platform). And the penalties for infractions are the same—fines of up to £18M (which is a gigantic multiple of my gross worth).

And it comes into effect on March 15th.

Accordingly ...

The blog will continue to exist.

However the comment threads may be closed for good after March 14th.

(I don't know for sure yet. It's very late in the day but the ICO may see sanity and provide some sort of sanity clause for hobbyist sites.) 

. . . 

Update: According to this in-depth article about the Act there appears to be a limited exemption for "limited functionality services" that covers blog comments—"but it may not include them if users can reply to each other - this is unclear". Ofcom are expected to clarify their regulations in January, so we can live in hope for a little longer. 

Also: "The OSA puts obligations on the service provider, so if you host a community on a platform such as Discord or WhatsApp, the OSA doesn't directly affect you." (So I may be able to open a forum on Discord instead.) 

Also: my quick first pass risk assessment per Ofcom guidelines is that this blog is, to put it mildly, at low risk for priority illegal content, if only because it doesn't provide most of the types of communication channel Ofcom is concerned with (eg. generating and hosting video and images, enabling direct 1:1 private communication between users).

From Sci-Fi author Charlie Stross's blog.

Blog Law

Implied license is an important concept in a lot of blog related copyright issues, although this particular one is one I hadn't even considered until now.

The opinion of a recent 11th Circuit case on the topic holds that the fact that your blog has an RSS feed does not mean that you have lost all copyright protections for it. The opinion begins:

This appeal involves a blog operator that sued a content aggregator for copyright infringement after the aggregator copied and published the blog’s content. A jury sided with the blog operator. 

The main issue for us is whether the  district court should have allowed the jury to decide whether the aggregator had an implied license to copy and publish the blog’s content. Although the district court employed a too narrow understanding of an implied license, we conclude that a jury could not have reasonably inferred that the blog impliedly granted the aggregator a license to copy and publish its content. 

The aggregator also argues that the district court erred when it instructed the jury about statutory damages, permitted the jury to consider ineligible works in awarding damages, failed to consult with the Register of Copyrights about the blog operator’s alleged fraud on her office, and denied the aggregator’s motion for judgment as a matter of law based on its defense of fair use. 

Because no reversible error occurred, we affirm.

From an opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

How Appealing notes other commentary on the decision:

At his “Technology & Marketing Law Blog,” Eric Goldman had a post titled “A Blog’s RSS Feed May Not Grant an Implied Copyright License — MidlevelU v. Newstex” about the federal district court’s ruling, which the Eleventh Circuit’s decision yesterday affirmed.

And in May 2020, Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation had a post titled “EFF to Appeals Court: Reverse Legal Gotchas on Ordinary Internet Activities.”

Decades of stagnant wages are a reality for a broad swath of Americans

The meme below is misleading at best. the median income figures aren't too far off from reality for inflation adjusted dollars, but are just plain wrong for the nominal dollars implied by the cost of eggs comparison provided. The reality is inflation adjusted 2018 dollars is that median income for Americans aged 25 to 34 was: 

$35,648 in 2016 (+0.9%)

$35,337 in 1977

Thus, young adults have received none of the benefit of the last four decades of economic growth and productivity growth in the United States.

Overall median income:

$32,542 in 2016 (+ 33.7%)

$24,334 in 1977.

If economic growth had been shared equitably over the last four decades, the median income for Americans aged 25 to 35 in inflation adjusted 2018 dollars would be:

$47,245.57 in 2016. 

In other words, the median young adult would make about $1000 a month more than they do.

This is the age at which people tend to start having kids, so this impacts not just the well being of young adults, but the well being of most children in the United States.

But, they aren't four times as poor as their peers from four decades ago as the meme implies. In fairness, the inconsistency is a product of the original tweet not clarifying that inflation adjusted dollars were used and the person responding to it misunderstanding what the numbers meant.

Reflections On Blogging In 2018

This has been the lightest year of blogging at Wash Park Prophet since its inception in 2005, although at 224 posts at a minimum this year, and six posts even in my slowest month, it is hardly a moribund blog.

Some of this reflects the split of my blogging into this blog and Dispatches at Turtle Island, which was established midway into 2011. Between the two blogs there will have been more than 436 posts in the year, with 17 combined posts in my slowest month. Again, very active by the standard of most blogs, but less active than I have been in the past, with the exception of 2014 which was the record low number of posts on both blogs, with a combined 331 posts (still more than six posts a week on the combined blogs).

This is a decline, mostly due to a shift of short and dirty posts from the slowly less popular blog format to Facebook on social media, upon which I often make several posts a day that receive a lot more attention. This space has become more focused on analysis or on posts with less immediacy and more of a long term relevance than the posts I make on Facebook which tend to be more partisan and political, more focused on current events, and more focused on my personal life.

I have also had a fair amount of activity at the Stack Exchange forums and on Physics Forums, and I sometimes post long comments at other people's blogs.

I average about 382 readers a day at this blog and about 383 readers a day at the sister blog, for a total of about 765 readers on an average day on the combined blogs, although this bounces up and down depending upon how often I post and how much interest people take in the posts I make at the time. A significant minority of traffic involves Google searches leading people to old posts. Twenty-two posts made this year at this blog (about one in ten) have had more than 200 readers, some of which had many more. Other posts attract much less interest. Despite the fact that the number of readers are about the same on both blogs, the number of comments is much higher on the sister blog than on this one.

Thirteen and a half years of blogging is a long time. My handwritten journals go back about four years earlier, to 2001. Both were started, in part, because before then I would clip paper newspaper articles and write down ideas on stray pieces of paper (something I did at least since my college days), with really no order, which was messy, hard to refer to, took up lots of space, and tended to suck me into cycles of writing the same idea over and over again because I had no way to refer back to what I had already done.

I have published all but about 22 of the posts that I have written in that time on both blogs combined, with the publish button not pushed in nine of them because they earned the "too much information" tag. I am not a particularly private person, but there are some things that even I don't want to share with the entire world on the Internet. Two are recent posts that are in process. The other eleven posts are posts that I put a lot of substantive research and thought into over the years, but bit off more than I could chew at the time to polish and finish and have never gotten back to completing (compounded by the fact that some are a bit dated now).

I suspect that I will make even fewer posts in 2019, but will probably still maintain an active blog here for the same reason that I started it, I want a place to organize my thoughts and keep track of interesting new information that I come across that I wouldn't have otherwise, and if I share it with the world, then it has more value.

Thinking Out Loud

I have added Lorenzo from Australia's blog "Thinking Out Loud" to the sidebar, because his sidebar aggregates content from most of the blogs I read and more (plus Dispatches From Turtle Island, this blog's sister blog about science), and also from many, many other blogs of similar quality and character. 

His posts are also thoughtful and well reasoned for the most part.

7003 Posts

This is the 7,003rd post at Wash Park Prophet (there are another 932 posts at sister blog Dispatches at Turtle Island and another 38 posts which are part of an incomplete serial novel at sister blog Wash Park Poet).

In other news, the blizzard in Denver is so bad right now that I can barely see further than a block outside my downtown office window.

Erowid Covered In The New Yorker Magazine

Erowid has been in my sidebar for a long time for good reason.

In February, Reddit users deemed it the fourth-most-worthy nonprofit out of more than eight thousand candidates, granting the site a donation of exactly $82,765.95. Erowid came in ahead of NPR.

Its proprietors, "Earth" and "Fire" are very near and dear to me and have been for a long time.  I went to their wedding, which was one of my favorite weddings ever.

Now, both their website/non-profit, and their personal lives, have been written up in a well done article in the November 23, 2015 edition of The New Yorker magazine.  Go read it.

GOP Nomination Race Still Wacky

Mr. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, is the choice of 26 percent of Republican primary voters, the poll found, while Mr. Trump now wins support from 22 percent, although the difference lies within the margin of sampling error. . . . Senator Marco Rubio of Florida received 8 percent while former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, are each the choice of 7 percent of Republican primary voters. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio each received support from 4 percent of those surveyed.

Per the New York Times regarding the latest CBS/NYT poll. The no political experience caucus has 55% support from likely Republican voters.

UPDATE October 30, 2015:

Reactions to yesterday's debate in Boulder proves how much debate performance is in the eye of the beholder.  Consider these two differing takes on Marco Rubio's performance:

The big takeaway for us was the damage to Marco Rubio. The Florida Republican took a few shots from moderators and candidates, but he reacted like somebody shot his dog. The question about Rubio has always been about what he’ll do when push comes to shove; if tonight is any indication, Rubio will fall down. A lot.

- Colorado Pols

Marco Rubio has strong performance in GOP debate in Boulder.

- Front Page Headline in the Denver Post.

I more urgent priorities than watching inept pot stirring CNBC news personalities try to herd the cats that are the top ten GOP Presidential candidates (let alone the bottom four GOP Presidential candidates at the opening act "kid's table" table before hand), so I can't offer my first hand impression.  Even if I could, it would be pretty irrelevant. I am definitely not in the target audience of the event: Republican primary or caucus voters and potential GOP donors to the campaigns.

Colorado Pols is coming at the event from a politically liberal perspective - its pretense to be bipartisan went by the wayside long ago.  But, Colorado Pols, as an outsider pundit, does care about making accurate assessments of how events like the debate will impact the race and really have a dog in the fight only at the must subtle and indirect level through concern trolling.  So, I was pretty stunned to see the Denver Post and Colorado Pols reach diametrically opposite conclusions about the winners and losers in the event.

The live blog at Colorado Pols revealed another point with which I doubt the Denver Post analysts would disagree.  Candidates for elected office in debates (and most other media contexts for that matter) make no more than a token effort to observe any sort of rules of decorum usually present in a debate or group discussion context, and likewise insist on spouting their own canned lines rather than attempting in good faith to meaningfully engage with the questions they are asked.

The political tactics of speaking out of turn and ignoring the questions that you are asked in favor of your own message are pretty much ubiquitous and illustrate how deeply order and decorum have vanished a shared political values in our civic culture.

Apparently, this is necessary to succeed in the untamed world of American politics.  But, it doesn't reflect well on us as a political community.

Of course, that isn't the only disappointing political tactic that works in American politics.  A far more longstanding and more deeply troubling feature of American politics, and it is certainly not limited to American politics, even though I wouldn't say that it is universal either, is the tolerance that the voting public has for being fed lines that simply aren't accurate or are gross hyperbole or that demonstrate that a candidate is just plain crazy.

There is still some political price to be paid for being overtly racists or sexist in political rhetoric, although for every two or three people alienated by that, there seems to be at least one potential voter (almost always Republican or Republican leaning) who responds intensely and more positively as a result, which is why Donald Trump is polling so well in the GOP race despite the anti-immigrant slurs that he launched his race with.  But, several Republican candidates in recent election cycles have lost their races over abominable statements they have made about rape.

But, when it comes to science, economics, or other public policy questions, the public doesn't seem to care at all if candidates spout utter nonsense, so long as conclusion, if true, doesn't cause any cognitive dissonance with their pre-existing world view, or desires.

Democracy in America will continue to be fragile until we can develop a political culture where saying things like vaccines cause autism, or climate change isn't real, or deep tax cuts will balance the budget or the Civil War wasn't fought to preserve slavery, makes a candidate unelectable.

Law Journalists Aren't So Hot At Math Either

The saying goes that lawyers become lawyers because they are bad at math (obviously, not true in my case).  It turns out that the maxim holds true for law journalists as well.

Law blog "Above the Law" is in my sidebar and often a good read.  But, a recent story of theirs, based upon this American Bar Association source, claiming that 95% of U.S. lawyers in private practice are in firms of 20 lawyers or less was not impressive.

The American Bar Association source that they relied upon was accurate, but the chart that Above The Law relied upon states that 95% of private U.S. law firms have 20 lawyers or less, said no such thing. The chart they reproduced in their story is this one:



Based upon it, they said: "So 95% of attorneys in private practice work at firm with 20 lawyers or fewer."

The obvious tip off that they had it wrong, even if you were focusing on the numbers instead of the words in the chart, was the bottom line.  Yes, there really are more than 47,562 lawyers in private practice in the United States today (there are actually 1,300,705 lawyers licensed in the United States as of 2015 and there were more than 700,000-800,000 lawyers when I was in college and wrote a report for a class on the emergence of large law firms in the legal market).

Meanwhile, a chart immediately above it on the same page of the source states that only 74% of lawyers working in private U.S. law firms work in firms of 20 lawyers or less.  In fact, 49% of all lawyers in private practice are sole practitioners.

This is still a lot of lawyers in "Small Law", but not nearly as impressive as the inaccurate statement that they make in their story.

SWPL

Waiting for an hour for breakfast and probably a few boozy beverages is seen as a luxury and habit of upper-middle-class and wealthy white people.

From the Denver Post.

Guilty as charged.

This time and money is available, in part, because this demographic is foregoing church attendance on Sunday mornings. Church goers opt instead for a dry, early afternoon Sunday dinner, either at home or at a less tony "family style" restaurant.

The blog that made the title acronym a part of Internet slang is here.

Welcome Marginal Revolutionaries.

Tyler Cohen has kindly highlighted a comment of mine made to a post of his entitled "Is Christmas Efficient?"  at the Marginal Revolution blog on the subject of the economic reasons for Christmas spending sprees.  There is criticism in the comments about the extent to which summer vacation and Ramadan are truly rooted in agricultural reality.  But, I'll take this opportunity to grandstand on another issue.

Economics as a discipline generally claims as part of the "official line" to not have normative goals, and instead to simply discuss how certain economic conditions or public policies translate into certain results.  But, in practice, economists tend to focus on how to optimize a couple of key metrics: "efficiency" and "productivity".

The existence of decades of sophisticated macroeconomic theory, however, has illustrated that notwithstanding all of our economic knowledge, periodic, severe business cycles are more or less unavoidable.  Indeed, recessions are pretty much the worst hardship in the daily of ordinary people in modern developed countries.

While ending business cycles seems to be an unattainable goal, making them more tolerable is another story.  There are many things that one can do, as a matter of economic policy, to make the economy more robust, albeit often at the cost of modest reductions in efficiency or productivity.

For example, removing tax code preferences for debt over equity, and insisting as a regulatory matter on larger bank reserves, will tend to reduce average earnings per share for stockholders in good times, but will also make it more likely that firms will survive economic downturns and places less pressure on firms to lay off workers during recessions.

These examples certainly aren't exhaustive.  But, the core issue is that there are lots of examples of low hanging fruit where policy measures could make our economy more robust that don't receive the attention that they deserve because they don't measure up by productivity and efficiency metrics.  Harm reduction in the face of recessions which economists would have to admit that they can't prevent isn't sexy, but it is a worthwhile endeavor.

Cease and Desist Letters Are Often Foolish

The Popehat blog explains at length why it is frequently counterproductive to try to use cease and desist letters as a tool to combat negative publicity.

Coming Attractions: Doing The Work Of "Second-Rate Minds" (i.e. "The Book")

It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
 

G.H.Hardy, A Mathematicians' Apology (1940), available here (via Quantum Diaries Survivor).

I am in the early stages of writing (with a collaborator who will be a co-author) a short, trade non-fiction book meant for an audience of educated non-specialists.  So, I anticipate that I will be devoting significant efforts to it over the next twelve months or so.

"The book" will be less technical and academic than academic journal articles or a magnus opus like "Albion's Seed" or Gibbon's "Rise and Fall."  But, won't be a textbook or comprehensive primer either.  Instead, it will be more along the lines of popularizations of the current state of knowledge about the topics it discusses with significant original analysis and introspection exemplified, for example, in books by people like Malcomb Gladwell and Jared Diamond (or less famously, bloggers like Peter Woit, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga  and Tyler Cohen).  I am also drawing to some extent on the trend towards recognizing a class of unaffiliated academic investigators and public intellectuals that the Internet has made possible.  Relative to journalist efforts, this will be the stuff of feature articles and op-ed page essays, rather than straight news reporting.

The mission statement of the book is basically to find a more prominent place in the never ending "national discussion" for some important but under appreciated facts, developing trends, and analytical perspectives that too often are ignored in favor of conventional wisdom.  We think we provide a perspective that isn't reflected in any of the "conventional wisdom" accounts of the topics we will discuss.  This matters.  Perhaps the greatest threat to modern industrialized societies today are those that arise from "group think."  It is important to enough end participants in the discussion, but it is even more important to maximize the number of alternative perspectives expressed in those discussions which the collective audience to this national discussion can weigh and when complimentary, synthesize into an overall approach.

Of course, as a side benefit, we are also buying a ticket for us in the fame and fortune lottery of trade non-fiction writing, and if it is successful there could be successor books along the same lines.

"The book" will not primarily consisting of original research, which I leave for people who have salaried professorships, research assistants, and university resources.

Instead, "the book" will seek primarily to explain the works of others, popularizing concepts and facts that are now familiar only to those at the cutting edge of professional expertise and academic research. Of course, we will go far further in terms of synthesis, connecting of the dots, and analysis than what would be appropriate in some other forums in which I publish or write like Wikipedia article contributions, continuing education courses, bar journal articles for practicing attorneys, and legal briefs. It will be more like the occassional academic conference papers that I write every few years, but with a broader scope and intended for a more general audience.

I come to this from the perspective of someone active in politics all of his life, who actively practices law, and who has intermittently been a journalist (in addition, of course, to being a blogger before the terms was even well established).  My collaborator is a novelist and free lance writer with a solid practical experience and academic background in addressing public policy issues.

Our motives are at least as rooted in the political tactics of movement politics and "saving the world" as they are in raw economics.  While books are "old school," they are still a very effective platform for influencing the national discussion and sowing the seeds of ideas in the heads of bright people who will find their own ways to apply.  At any rate, they are effective relative to posts at a couple of blogs that are currently well into the long tail, or the discipline or industry specific academic or trade publications that similarly have only a small audience, even if that audience is an elite and influential one. 

From my perspective, good ideas mean nothing unless enough of the right people are aware of them, consider them in their professional and political lives, and apply them.  The book will help bridge the gap between what somebody knows and what lots of people know about these topics.

For example, many of the currently influential mathematics of fractal dimensions and chaotic dynamics that emerged in the late 1800s was virtually overlooked by all but a few specialist graduate students in obscure academic journals (some available only in Russian) that failed to illustrate how these ideas could be applied or incorporated into other works, until Benoît Mandelbrot took the lonely road of reinvigorating the field starting in the 1960s that only really took off when his ideas started to be popularized in the trade press in the 1980s and early 1990s.  Once people knew that these concepts were out there, however, professionals and academics in disciplines from physics to engineering to economics to mathematics to information technology and beyond started to incorporate these ideas into the crowded math and statistics canon of concepts taught to undergraduates and first year graduate students in math and science disciplines (most of which was well established before the United States adopted the Bill of Rights).

At this point, "the book" has a working title and overall theme, a lot of research and very rough draft writing for many of the chapters (although without a final determination on which chapters will stay and which will go, or on how they will be organized), an overall sense of where the book will fit on a range from very journalist to very academic, a sense of what some of the core subtopics will be, a general sense of what steps will be taken in the writing and marketing process, an agreement in principle on how tasks will be allocated between the co-authors, and an understanding about how the economics and division of credit will be addressed.  But, the devil is in the details and a great deal of the work still needs to be done.

In the interest of building up dramatic tension and allowing the ideas to gel and to be modified in the course of the writing process, I won't be providing much detail on the specific substance of what will be in the book until much, much later.  But, I will note that posts at this blog and its companion blog, Dispatches from Turtle Island, are and will continue to be one important source for the initial core of supporting facts, academic research, government reports, and analytical constructs that will be systematized, expanded upon and updated in the book.

At any rate, if you notice a reduced volume of posting over the next many months, part of this may be because my available creative capacity is being diverted to "the book." 

Stay tuned.

What is the useful life of an investment in intellectual property?

The Bureau of Economic Analysis is trying to determine the time period over which to amortize investments in cultural intellectual property investments, for example, in books, movies, and music recordings for purposes of GDP accounting.  To do so,  they are measuring the time periods over which these asset classes from a given year of production generate returns in real life, and fitting this to a model in which the return on the asset class declines by a specific percentage each year (it isn't clear if the BEA is using straight line depreciation or iterating a percentage decline each year from the previous year's value).  The results:

Music recordings: 26.7% per year
Television shows: 16.8%
Books: 12.1%
Movies 3.8%
Miscellaneous: 10.9% (e.g. "theatrical play scripts, stock photography, greeting-card designs, etc.).

On a straight line depreciation basis, this would give a movie a useful life of 26 years, miscellaneous cultural properties about 9 nine years, books about 8 years, television shows about 6 years, and music recording about 4 years.  A percentage reduction each year would never get quite to zero and would also reach say 1% or less, considerably more slowly.  The post at Slate by by Matthew Yglesias doesn't source his figures, so its hard to tell.

These numbers seem quite low to me (i.e. my intuitive estimate of the rate at which cultural investments depreciate would be higher), but all of these numbers make two points very clear. 

First: Existing copyright law protection time periods grossly exceed the typical time period in which the vast majority of the economic value of an intellectual property asset is realized, even if you look at entire asset classes which weight the time period of economic returns heavily towards the rare mega-successful works with longer shelf lives.

Second: Different kinds of cultural properties protected by copyrights actually have very different useful economic lives.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that website IIMDb.com is so credible that it is used to help calculate our nation's GDP.

UPDATE: The source for the article appears to be here:

Capitalization of entertainment, literary, and other artistic originals Some entertainment, literary, and other artistic originals are designed to generate mass reproductions for sale to the general public and to have a useful lifespan of more than one year. For 1929 forward, BEA will capitalize these items, which include theatrical movies, long-lived television programs, books, music, and “other” miscellaneous entertainment.[21] This change will expand BEA’s measures of intangible assets in the NIPAs and help better align the NIPAs with recommendations of the SNA.[22]  

Current treatment The costs associated with the production of entertainment originals are currently classified as expenses that are consumed as part of the production of other goods and services. Therefore, expenditures for the production of entertainment originals do not enter into the calculation of GDP.  

New treatment Under the new treatment, BEA will record the private expenditures associated with producing or purchasing entertainment originals as private fixed investment in the measure of GDP.[23] The production of entertainment originals may span several years. Theoretically, these costs should be recorded as investment when accrued; however, due to practical constraints, BEA will record the value of the investment in the year the asset is released to the public. Entertainment originals are rarely sold in an open market, so it is difficult to observe market prices for these original works. This is a common problem with measuring the value of intangible assets, and in such cases, other valuation methods must be utilized, such as the sum of the production costs (which is used for own-account software and R&D) or the estimated net present value (NPV).[24] Because adequate information on production costs is not available for most entertainment originals, BEA will estimate the value of these assets based on the NPV of expected future royalties or other revenue obtained from these assets, net of any associated sales costs. For investment in theatrical movies prior to 2007, the estimates will be derived using a production costs approach based on movie budget data. For each type of entertainment originals asset, the expected net cash flow of the producing industry will be estimated using revenue and cost data from the Census Bureau’s economic censuses and surveys, numerous trade sources, and databases such as IMDb.com.[25] BEA will assume a 7 percent real discount rate for all asset types and will apply an NPV adjustment factor, a ratio that represents the average NPV-to-current period revenues from new works, to current-year revenues in order to derive an estimate of investment in entertainment originals for that year.  

Estimation methodology. First, total current-period revenue from licensing fees, merchandise sales, ticket sales, and other revenue generating activities for the industries producing the assets will be estimated. Second, the value of sales costs—such as advertising, manufacturing of reproductions, and other marketing type costs—will be subtracted from the total current period revenues to derive net revenue values that capture only the revenues earned on the intangible assets held by the business. Third, these net revenue values will be adjusted further to only include the revenue from the release of new works (that is, the “originals”), using BEA-derived investment ratios.26 Finally, the NPV adjustment factor will be applied to the net revenue value that has been adjusted by the investment ratio in order to derive the current-period investment value of the future revenue stream of these new works.  

Depreciation of newly recognized assets. The depreciation of entertainment originals assets, like the depreciation of R&D assets, will be included in the NIPA measure of CFC. BEA will estimate service lives and depreciation rates for each type of entertainment originals asset based on its net present value over time as described above. The depreciation rates will follow a geometric pattern in which a constant percentage of the existing asset stock depreciates each year. The typical movie, for example, is released in theaters, followed by DVDs, premium television, regular cable networks, foreign television, and U.S. broadcast networks. Based on an analysis of the profits obtained from these successive releases, BEA estimates an annual depreciation rate of 3.8 percent. For television programs, which earn a substantial proportion of their long-term revenue in their first airing, the depreciation rate is 16.8 percent. For music, an even larger portion of profits is obtained in the first year of release, and so the estimated depreciation rate is 26.7 percent. The estimated depreciation rate is 12.1 percent for books and 10.9 percent for theatrical play scripts, greeting card designs, and stock photography. [26] Long-lived television programs include situation comedies and drama programs. Other types of television programs, including news programs, sporting events, game shows, soap operas, and reality programming have much shorter service lives and will not be capitalized. “Other” miscellaneous entertainment includes miscellaneous artwork including theatrical play scripts, greeting card designs, and commercial stock photography.  . . .

The recognition of entertainment originals as investment will boost the level of gross private domestic investment, which will in turn boost the level of GDP. Based on preliminary research, private investment in entertainment originals for 2007 is estimated at about $70 billion. About one-third of the new investment is in theatrical movies, one-third in television programs, and the remaining one-third in the other entertainment original assets." 

22. This change was introduced in a SURVEY article by Rachel H. Soloveichik, “Artistic Originals as Capital Assets,” SURVEY 91 (June 2011): 43–51. See also SNA 2008, 207, paragraph 10.115 and “Entertainment, Literary, and Artistic Originals,” in the Handbook on Deriving Capital Measures of Intellectual Property Products (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD): Paris, October 2010): 150–166. 

23. BEA will not identify any investment in entertainment originals by governments.  

24. The SNA discusses the use of NPV for estimating the value of assets (SNA 2008, 22, paragraph 2.60, 52, paragraph 3.137–138); see also the OECD Handbook on Deriving Capital Measures of Intellectual Property Product, 18, 158–159.  

25. BEA will benchmark its investment estimates to revenue data from the 2007 economic census.  

26. Based on research using trade sources, studies, and survey and economic census data from the Census Bureau, BEA estimates the following investment ratios for the five categories of entertainment originals assets: 51 percent of industry revenue for theatrical movies, 50 percent of industry revenue for music, 37 percent of industry revenue for books, 30 percent of industry revenue for television, and 15 percent of industry revenue for miscellaneous artwork. The remaining revenue is spent on nonartwork costs such as advertising, stamping DVDs, or printing books. The NIPAs record these nonartwork costs as current production costs.

The key June 2011 paper that developed these estimates is here. It notes that:

Before 2005, IMDB.com data—which gives filming dates and production budgets for individual movies from 1900 to 2011[9]—were used to estimate annual investment expenditures. . . .

Theatrical movies and television programs have the longest lifespans.[19] Ten years after the first release, theatrical movies retain 48 percent of their initial value, and television programs retain 35 percent of their initial value. In contrast, books and music earn most of their money in the first 5 years; after 10 years, music retains 19 percent of its initial value, and books retain 14 percent of their initial value.

The main reason for the different lifespans among the categories is consumer storage.[20] Theatrical movies and television shows get most of their money from television licensing. Accordingly, the studios get paid each time a classic movie or television episode is replayed. In contrast, books and music get most of their money from the initial sale. Once consumers have bought a book, they can reread it without paying more money to the publisher. In this paper, only the capital stock of original artwork was measured. Therefore, the reprint rights owned by publishing houses are counted but not the physical books owned by libraries and consumers. The depreciation schedules in chart 4 are based on revenue net of sales costs. Studios, musicians, and authors typically spend a great deal of money advertising their new releases. BEA’s general practice is to treat advertising as a current expense. Because advertising is a current expense, all advertising costs are deducted from revenue for a particular year. As a result, first year profits are much lower than first year revenue. In fact, theatrical movies actually have losses in the first quarter and therefore appear to gain value early in their lifespan. Some might consider advertising a long-lived investment in brand awareness. That treatment of advertising suggests higher depreciation rates for artwork in the first year after release.[21]

9. IMDB reports data for most major movies, with better coverage of recent movies and more expensive productions. The missing data were imputed.

19. The depreciation rate for television programs is still preliminary and may change significantly in the final version.

20. Consumers can tape a movie or television program when it is first aired and then watch it whenever they chose. In practice, very few people use their DVR for long-term storage. Instead, they watch whatever is on.

21. However, the capital value of artwork plus capitalized advertising would be identical to my capital values for artwork alone.

Awesome South Asian Economic Data Presentations

The blog Data Stories does a stunning job of visually presenting data about the economy of India.  I've added it to the blog roll. For example, it is one thing to see per capita GDP data, and quite another to see statistics like this:

Around 18% of households in India don’t own any of the assets listed on the census form – that means no phone, no TV or radio, and no bicycles or other vehicles of any kind. [In many county sized districts in India the percentage is 48% or more.] . . . Take a look at the map below. It maps the proportion of households in each district, who told census-takers that they own all of the following – a TV set, a phone, a computer and a vehicle (scooter/motorcycle or car). That number, for the country as a whole, is 4.6% (roughly 11 million households). I leave you to draw your own conclusions about what it means to be ‘privileged’ in this country.

Admittedly, I don't own a television set myself. But, that is something of a first world fluke that reflects abundance in other domains. It isn't uncommon for there to be in my apartment that houses my two children and I at any given time four laptop computers, two iPods, two cell phones, a Kindle, and five radios (including the one in my SUV) as well as a networked printer, a wireless router with a high speed internet connection, and a bicycle with a flat tire. Very few people in the top 4.6% of the U.S. wealth distribution would like any of these items which I suspect around half of Americans who are in poverty own. Anyway, here's the interactive map:

Another great graphic (also interactive) is this one:




Also, as my Sociology 101 professor made clear to me early on, it is important to keep in mind that with many technologies, like televisions and phones, the difference between having only a handful in a village and having none can be huge in their cultural impact.