It was stolen by the Anglo-Saxons.
Dr. Madsen Pirie explains why 15,000 folks leave France every year to live in Britain. This is something that needs explaining because, as he puts it, “why do people leave a country with better food, more reliable transport, longer lunch breaks, and more generous social security?”

French leave [Adam Smith blog]

We recently came across a study showing that lesbians — at least in the UK — earned consistently more than their hetero counterparts. You can fill in your own explanation. It turns out there’s been a lot of research lately into this question, much of it undermining the argument that plain vanilla bigotry accounts for the male/female disparity (although we haven’t heard that argument since we attended a friend’s graduation from Mt. Holyoke). Here’s the latest we’ve come across:

In most Western countries illness-related absenteeism is higher among female workers than among male workers. Using the personnel dataset of a large Italian bank, we show that the probability of an absence due to illness increases for females, relative to males, approximately 28 days after a previous illness. This difference disappears for workers age 45 or older. We interpret this as evidence that the menstrual cycle raises female absenteeism. Absences with a 28-day cycle explain a significant fraction of the male-female absenteeism gap.

The study goes onto suggest this difference accounts for a 12% income gap.
Hmm, perhaps this whole freakonomics thing thing has run its course. Sorta makes you pine for the days when economists did stuff like forecasting the GDP, or advise presidents about price controls.
More about menstruation and the gender earnings gap [New Economist]

We think that’s the message of economist Robert Frank’s short essay in the New York Times today. Writing about the rise in popularity of SUVs, Frank says, “The conventional determinants of consumer demand cannot explain this astonishing trajectory.”
So what “determinant” explains why people started driving fancy trucks? Frank says it’s a “herd instinct”—people imitating richer people. The idea is that because some real ballers started rolling large, everyone else jumped on board with it.
The irony is that now that hybrids and energy conservation are becoming fashionable, not driving an SUV is also a reflection of the herd instinct.
So, basically, no matter what you drive the message you are communicating can be summed up in one word—Mooo.

The Herd Changes Course and Runs Away From S.U.V.’s [The New York Times]

And the answer apparently is not “they remind us of things we heard about years ago but now seems horribly dated.”

Levitt: Selling Cable Is Like Dealing Crack [Multichannelnews.com]

While some economists are busily trying to figure out things the invisible mechanisms in macho things like sports and crime, University of Florida economics student Alexander Villacampa deserves some sort of award for totally embracing his inner nerd.
Here he is describing the economics of the massive multiplayer online role-playing game “World of Warcraft.” And with that young Alexander has firmly established that the only way he will ever get a girl is if he builds a hedge fund algorithm and marries her in the palace of Versailles.

The Economics of ‘World of Warcraft’
[LewRockwell.Com]

Remember when DC comics killed Superman? Yeah, we don’t remember that either. Because we never read DC comics. Those were comics for kids who did their chores, never skipped school and would rat on you to the prefects about the bottle of bourbon you had under the loose floorboards. Even when they tried to go dark, they couldn’t shake the legacy of rainbows, aqua-blue tights and perfect hair. (Frank Miller’s Dark Knight is the exception that proves the rule.)
Superman was the worst of it. A do-gooder whose biggest problem in life was that his girlfriend didn’t know he was a man of steel.
Bob Murphy says the real problem with Superman was that he needed an agent. Someone to set him up with the right jobs. Someone to help him make some dough with his highly productive skill set.

To best exploit his amazing potential, Superman should hire an agent (or even a team of agents) who is fully briefed on the Kryptonian’s various powers, and then works around the clock finding potential employers. If the world of the Superman movies really existed, I would find some way of contacting him and make him the following offer: “Mr. El, if you let me be your agent, I can guarantee you $100 billion in pretax earnings the first year, or else I work for free. If we do meet the target, though, all I ask is a measly .01 percent commission on everything you earn above it.”
If he took me up on this offer, I am quite confident that I’d be rich. Consider payload delivery: In 1990 Arabsat Consortium paid the Chinese government $25 million to launch a satellite into orbit, and this was considered an unfairly low price in Western countries. Because of the reduced risk (Superman won’t explode on the launch pad) and scheduling convenience (he can do it tomorrow if you really need it done quickly), Superman could easily charge this amount. Since he was able to deliver the Eiffel Tower elevator (containing the nuclear bomb) into space in less than sixty seconds, Superman could leisurely put a dozen satellites into orbit per hour. At that rate (and assuming a forty-hour work week and two weeks vacation per year), Superman could earn $600 billion annually.

Superman Needs an Agent [Mises.Org]

How pissed off must those guys who stole soft drink secrets from Coke have been when they learned that Pepsi ratted them out? What’s the point of engaging in corporate espionage if you can’t even sell the secrets to your victim’s biggest rival? Must really take the wind out of the sails of many a would-be corporate spy.
Why would Pepsi do that anyway? Were they afraid of getting caught? Is Pepsi simply run by paragons of legal compliance and other virtues? Maybe. Or maybe the problem was the Pepsi just doesn’t want to know the secrets of Coke. That’s what Freakonomist Stephen Levitt proposes.

Let’s say that Pepsi knew Coke’s secret formula and could publish it so that anyone could make a drink that tasted just like Coke. That would be a lot like what happens to prescription drugs when they go off patent and generic drug companies come in. The impact would be that the price of real Coke would fall a lot (probably not all the way to the price of the generic Coke knockoffs). This would clearly be terrible for Coke. It would probably also be bad for Pepsi. With Coke now much cheaper, people would switch from Pepsi to Coke. Pepsi profits would likely fall.

How much would Pepsi pay to get Coke’s secret formula? [Freakonomics Blog]