Month: July 2011

I can’t think of a better time to be alive. Or, is the middle class better off today than in 1975?

Don Boudreaux has a fantastic PowerPoint presentation posted at Café Hayek:  Stagnating Middle-Class? It is from a presentation he gave at Cato University.

He opened up a 1974/1975 Sears catalogue. He then calculated how many hours a person would have to work to buy something in 1975 compared to buying a similar item today.

To make the comparison he obtained the hourly wage of an average non-supervisory employee in 1975 and the same average wage today. Those average wages are $4.87 in 1975 and $19.00 today.

For example, in 1975, a 35mm SLR camera, pretty nice for back then, was $347. That is 71.3 hours work for an average worker. In contrast, a Nikon Coolpix 12.0 mp camera today is 4.8 hours of labor.

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Space shuttle as illustration of opportunity cost and cul-de-sac

How to combine the idea of opportunity cost, cul-de-sac, and government overruns in one post?

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial (behind paywall) says:

When it was first conceived, the shuttle was supposed to be a kind of space truck, going into orbit 50 to 75 times a year and carrying large payloads at a cost of $54 million a launch in 2011 dollars. It didn’t work out that way. The shuttle went aloft an average of five times a year. The cost-per-launch averaged some $1.5 billion. Its heaviest payloads barely exceeded what an unmanned Delta IV rocket can carry.

Let’s do some math, shall we?

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When is it time to let go of a project? The Dip, by Seth Godin

Previous post introduced the ideas of Cliffs, Cul-de-sacs, and Dips explained by Seth Godin in his book, The Dip.

What do we do with that idea?

Seth Godin says:

It’s okay to quit, sometimes.

In fact, it’s okay to quit often.

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What are Cliffs, Cul-de-sacs, and Dips? The Dip, by Seth Godin

When is it time to push through the obstacles and keep trying to achieve?

That is the topic of Seth Godin’s book, The Dip. Since the book was written in 2007, I am late to the party. Still want to write about it because most people I talk to are not familiar with his work.

We need to distinguish between cliffs, cul-de-sacs, and dips.

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