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Why Houses Cost More in Summer
(Comments: 0)An economics mystery has finally been solved.
By Tim Harford
Updated Saturday, Sept. 6, 2008
It’s still a miserable year to be selling a house.
In May, for example, U.S. house prices fell by 0.4 percent, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Index. (The raw data are here.)
Except: They didn’t.
House prices actually rose in May, albeit very slightly, according to exactly the same source.
Why the difference? The first number is the result of “seasonal adjustment,” an attempt to strip out predictable calendar patterns and report just the underlying trend. House-price indices are presented in seasonally adjusted form by researchers and reported that way by the media. That makes some sense. For anyone trying to understand the big picture, predictable seasonal gyrations just get in the way.
But for anyone trying to buy or sell a house, predictable seasonal gyrations can’t be ignored. Nobody pays a seasonally adjusted price. If you spend $500,000 on a house in a typical February, you might expect to have paid $515,000 had you waited until August. That $15,000 is money in your pocket…
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Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow?
(Comments: 2)Plus, two horrible things your Internet service provider wants to do to make it speedier.
Posted Friday, Sept. 5, 2008, at 7:45 AM ET
Everyone hates their Internet service provider. And with good cause: In the age of ubiquitous Internet access, Web service in America is still often frustratingly slow. Tired of being the villain, telecom companies have assigned blame for this problem to a new bad guy. He’s called the “bandwidth hog,” and it’s his fault that streaming video on your computer looks more like a slide show than a movie. The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth—sometimes more during peak hours. While these “power users” are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load.
The ISPs are certainly correct that there’s a problem: The current network in the United States struggles to accommodate everyone, and the barbarians at the gate—voice-over-IP telephony, live video streams, high-def movies—threaten to drown the grid. (This Deloitte report has a good treatment of that eventuality.) It’s less clear that the telecom companies, fixated as they are on the bandwidth hogs, are doing a good job of managing the problem and planning for the future. The ISPs have put forward two big ideas, in recent months, about how to fix our bandwidth crisis. We can arrange these plans into two categories: horrible now and horrible later.
Plan One: Feed the meter. Category: Horrible now. In January…
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Hybrid savings: Winners and losers
(Comments: 3)Consumer Reports crunches the numbers on hybrid vehicles that pay back the fastest and some that don’t make dollar sense.
In its October issue, Consumer Reports magazine looks at the overall financial benefit of 12 different hybrid vehicles. The analysis takes into account initial outlays compared with similar non-hybrid vehicles, as well as fuel, insurance, maintenance and deprecation costs.
The Saturn Vue Green Line comes out on top when looking at five-year total cost savings, according to Consumer Reports.
The top choices:
Saturn Vue Green Line
Cost: $26,920
Fuel economy (CR test): 28 mpg
Total 5-year savings: $4,550
Toyota Camry Hybrid
Cost: $28,460
Fuel economy (CR test): 34 mpg
Total 5-year savings: $4,250
Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid
Cost: $55,585
Fuel economy (CR test): 19 mpg
Total 5-year savings: $3,700
for the other nine vehicles …
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