Marginal Revolution

Markets in everything China fact of the day

A Chinese online store is selling hacked, illegal iTunes accounts tied to active credit cards, offering $200 worth of content from Apple's service for as little as $30.

China's Global Times this week revealed that about 50,000 illegal accounts are being sold through taobao.com, with prices ranging from just 1 yuan to about 200 yuan, or $30. Many of the sales are said to be stolen iTunes user accounts being re-sold by hackers.

Here is more.

Classical music for $100

Enda asks:

Loyal MR reader and consumer of alternative/indie/rock music here. If someone asked me for a broad introduction to the best of the genre with a budget of $100, my personal recommendation would be to purchase Sgt Pepper (The Beatles), skip most of the next two decades, Doolittle (Pixies), OK Computer (Radiohead), Pinkerton (Weezer), Siamese Dream (Smashing Pumpkins), Loveless (My Bloody Valentine), Is This It (The Strokes), Songs for the Deaf (Queens of the Stone Age) and Funeral (Arcade Fire).I have a $100 budget for an introduction to classical music and an essentially blank canvas. Your recommendations?

I'll price this by the CDs rather than the MP3s:

1. Start with a box of the Beethoven symphonies, either Gardiner or van Karajan cost only $20.  (For $43 the Klemperer set offers the piano concerti as well.) 

2. The Bach Brandenburg Concerti; the Pinnock set is basically $20 with the Suites thrown in.  Or get the Alessandrini set for $26.

 

3. Glenn Gould, both sets of the Goldberg Variations, $13.

  

4. Never buy an inferior recording simply because it is cheaper.  In the long run it is more expensive.

5. Mozart, symphonies 40 and 41 and other late symphonies, $15.

That brings us to about $68. For the rest I would draw from Dvorak's New World Symphony, Schubert (Symphony 9 or Trout Quintet, with superb pairings on both CDs), assorted Chopin, Beethoven piano sonatas, or Monteverdi, or Philip Glass Songs from the Trilogy.  In general, try whichever pieces might have personal meaning to you; for instance if you liked the movie Black Swan, buy Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (by either Previn or Pletnev) I've focused on the most accessible pieces, but if you wish to skip ahead Schubert's String Quintet is better than the Trout, Op.31, etc.

Love song for (Friedrich) Hayek

View it here, I like the rhyme with "kayak."  For the pointer I thank Bob Cottrell.

My favorite new music releases of 2010

For classical releases I thought this was a stunning year, but a mediocre year in a lot of other categories.  I do however have a few (non-classical) favorites:

Timbuktu Tarab, by Khaira Arby; from Mali, intense.

Sikilela, by Amabutho; from South Africa.

In both cases I have trouble distinguishing the album name from the performer name and that is often a good sign of quality for world music.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, by Kanye West.

If you're looking for a fun song to download, beyond the stuff you probably already know, try Gyptian's "Nah Let Go," a joyous reggae song.

Most of this year's Spin picks and the like I found fairly boring.

Further thoughts on the TSA debates

The biggest flying/airport outrages are a lack of markets in allocating scarce resources, and the resulting unacceptable airport and flight delay problems in places such as JFK and LaGuardia.  Next come airlines which ruthlessly screw you over, repeatedly, and lie to you and mistreat you.  I do understand the trade-off and prefer the lower prices and fewer quality assurances; still, you can object to their behavior at the margin -- it's often unethical.  Let's get worked up over these problems first.    

I view good scans as, in the long run, a substitute for patdowns.  One option is to have very very good scans, nude "photos," fewer patdowns, and to have Americans shift to a more European attitude on nude bodies.  There's even an available status attitude where you don't mind or notice the scans, much as the King allowed himself to be dressed and handled by commoners.  That's the intelligent argument for the current shift in policy.  Maybe the enhanced scans simply aren't useful or maybe Americans can't or won't shift their norms.  Those would be reasons not to do it (and I am not pronouncing a definitive opinion here) but it's simply not, in principle, that objectionable of a policy.  There's a locked-in structure which prevents a competitive test of safety levels and so all alternatives are coercive in some manner, including the difficulty any airline would face in attempting an even more restrictive set of security procedures.

It's worth asking how intrusive a search markets would provide, but keep in mind there are significant negative externalities from exploding airplanes and also there are government bailouts which limit the downside.  Furthermore companies do not always care enough about "extreme negative skewness," as we have learned in financial markets and thus there is a case for regulating a tougher security standard.

Hovering in the background is the reality that a few successful downings will kill many people and furthermore probably wipe out the insurance market and thus lead to nationalization of the airlines.  It's not clear what the freedom-enhancing path looks like and there is no default setting of market accountability.  It's "elephant interventions" all the way down. 

It's worth comparing the current American response to earlier British crises (IRA troubles, and eventual CCTV) or for that matter Israeli responses to Palestinian suicide bombings.  In these kinds of situations something has to give -- usually by public demand for better outcomes more than a state usurpation of power.    

I would not say that "we are now at war with the terrorists" but our situation has some war-like elements.  Any persistent war has required major social changes, if only temporary ones, in how the body is viewed and handled.  If we are so unwilling to even consider these changes in body viewing norms, I wonder how we will respond when scarier events happen, as they likely will.  

The funny thing is this: when Americans insist on total liberty against external molestation, it motivates both good responses and bad ones.  It supports a libertarian desire for freedom against government abuse, but the same sentiments generate a lot of anti-liberal policies when it comes to immigration, foreign policy, torture, rendition, attitudes toward Muslims, executive power, and most generally treatment of "others."  An insistence on zero molestation, zero risk, isn't as pro-liberty as it appears in the isolated context of pat-downs.  It leads us to impose a lot of costs on others, usually without thinking much about their rights.

The issue reminds me of the taxation and spending debates; many Americans want low taxes and high government spending, forever.  For airline security, at times we want to treat it as a matter of mere law enforcement, to be handled by others, and one which should not inconvenience our daily lives or infringe on our rights.  At the same time, so many Americans view airline security as a vital matter of foreign policy and indeed as part of a war.  We own and promote this view and yet we are outraged when asked to behave as one might be expected to in a theater of war.  

The main danger to liberty here is not the TSA but rather a set of American attitudes which, at the same time, take our current "war" both far too seriously and also not nearly seriously enough.

Overall, I'd like to see less posturing in these debates and more Thucydides.

Meta-list of *Fanfare* classical music recommendations

I've read through the November/December issue of Fanfare, in particular the Christmas Want Lists, as I do every year.  These are the new releases which appear on more than one list:

1. Stephen Hough and Osmo Vanska, playing the Tchaikovsky piano concerti.  This was the only item selected by three critics.

2. John Butt, conducting J.S. Bach, Mass in B Minor, Joshua Rifkin style.  This is the recording which is supposed to convert the unpersuaded to the minimalist vocal approach.

3. Dennis Russell Davies, conducting Haydn's complete symphonies.  Elevated for the sake of completeness, no one is saying it is better than Dorati.

4. Volkmar Andreae, conducting the Bruckner symphonies and Te Deum.  Remastered mono from the 1950s, supposed to be perfection.

5. Robert Schumann, Carneval, Kreisleriana, Arabeske, by Vassily Primakov.

I have found Fanfare Christmas lists to be a very reliable source of excellent music.

Richard T. Gill

Richard T. Gill, in all statistical probability the only Harvard economist to sing 86 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, died on Monday...He was 82.

The article is here.  Gill wrote many widely used texts and oddly he did not begin vocal training until he was almost forty. Up until that point, he had little acquaintance with classical music and he smoked two and a half packs of cigarettes a day.  He first performed in a staging of Figaro at Harvard, directed by John Lithgow and conducted by John Adams (the John Adams).  Later, he was in the world premiere of Philip Glass's Satyagraha.  Gill continued to write and edit textbooks throughout his singing career.

In 1971 he gave up his tenure at Harvard.  In 1984-85 he hosted a 28-part PBS show on economics.  In the 1990s he wrote two books, one on population the other on the decline of the American family.  Here is Gill's proposal for a Parental Bill of Rights.  His short stories for Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker were widely anthologized and in 2003 he published his first novel.

Here is his home page.  At the time of his death he was working on a three to four-volume autobiography.  As a Harvard undergraduate he was a successful boxer and somehow he ended up as an Assistant Dean at Harvard by age 21 and later Master of Leverett House.

Rip-off

The iTunes version of 4'33" offers all three movements, a snip at $1.99.  Strangely, they only add up to 4'31".  You might have thought a duration of four minutes and thirty-three seconds the minimum prerequisite for a recording of 4'33": apparently not.

That is by Wesley Stace, from his review "Hush Now: The silent of music and the music of noise," TLS 15 October 2010.

Futile (yet worthy) markets in everything

If someone doesn't like a band or artist, they would usually just ignore their music, but James Burns hates Weezer so much he's willing to raise millions to get them to hang it up for good. Seattle native Burns launched an online fundraiser to collect $10 million in hopes of sending Weezer to early retirement, The Stranger reports.

Despite only raising $12 to this point, Burns' plea to Weezer isn't so much about his own feelings for the band but rather the anguish the group causes his friends who keep waiting for the band to produce a monumental album like 'Pinkerton' and their debut, the so-called 'Blue Album.'

"This isn't about me. This is about Weezer fans," Burns wrote on the website. "This is an abusive relationship, and it needs to stop now. I am tired of my friends being disappointed year after year."

Patrick Wilson, drummer for Weezer, played along and responded on Twitter asking Burns to raise the stakes.

"If they can make it to 20, we'll do the 'deluxe breakup!'" Wilson tweeted.

The Stranger then interviewed Burns, and he says he's willing to stick out for the long haul until he raises the money. As for the angry fans attacking Burns, he doesn't mind them so much.

"I am not afraid of Weezer fans," Burns said. "I can take it. Besides, I'm doing this mostly for them."

For the pointer I thank Michael Greenspan.

Parenthetical sentences to ponder

(The longest doctoral program in the nation is the music program at Washington University in St. Louis, with a median length of 16.3 years, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

The link is here.