Wednesday 17 August 2011

Making shit up for fun and profit

Yet more numbers emerges from the Making-Shit-Up file, this time from a report on “fast broadband” written by BERL at the instruction of the Auckland and Bay of Plenty Councils. 

The report purports to show that “early roll-out, adoption and uptake” of “fast broadband” will make us all rich. But as Eric Crampton points out, this is based on some heroic, not to say nonsensical, assumptions about the sort of productivity increased by filing reports at 10 mbps rather than 500 kpbs.

Read A number I don't believe  - O F F S E T T I N G   B E H A V I O U R

3 comments:

Falafulu Fisi said...

It is big business writing economics' reports these days, whether it is nonsense or not.

Eric Crampton said...

Would you believe that a dairy farmer in Bay of Plenty could improve herd output by a sixth if only he had faster access to daily information from Fonterra Factory?

Me neither.

Mort said...

its not the information that is important, it is the live streamed moozik from fongterraz instadownload site