Web Monitor
15:52 UK time, Tuesday, 5 January 2010
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: the economising economists, looking back at binge drinking and mobiles across the world.
• the world of economists to see how much scrimping and saving goes on in their private lives. He detects a trend for economists to be more likely to be free-loading cheapskates and notes that it stretches back quite a bit:
"Some of the world's most famous economists were famously frugal. After a dinner thrown by the British economic giant John Maynard Keynes, writer Virginia Woolf complained that the guests had to pick 'the bones of Maynard's grouse of which there were three to eleven people.' Milton Friedman, the late Nobel laureate, routinely returned reporters' calls collect."
After the Christmas-New Year break, the relationship with alcohol is often reconsidered. that we are being fooled into thinking binge drinking is traditional in Britain:
"Worrying about drink may be as British as talking about the weather, but binge drinking is not as British as rain and the danger of believing otherwise is that, to echo George Gascoigne, recent fashions will be misperceived as entrenched traditions and thereby reinforced. History doesn't tell us any simple stories when it comes to the place of alcohol in British society. But, if we are right to be concerned about recent trends, then this complexity should be embraced."
The that although technology often spreads in a similar way across the world, mobile phone usage differs widely. Anthropologists studying mobile phone subcultures (Web Monitor kids you not) have been looking into it:
"In hot India, for instance, men rarely wear jackets, but their shirts have pockets to hold phones - which therefore cannot be large. Indian women keep phones in colourful pouches, less as a fashion statement than as a way to protect the devices and preserve their resale value. It also makes for a noteworthy contrast with Japan, says Ms Jung. If women there keep phones in a pouch and decorate them with stickers and straps, that has nothing to do with economics, but reflects the urge to personalise the handset. Phones are highly subsidised in Japan and the resale value is essentially nil, so it is not unusual to see lost units lying in the gutter."
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