The quote Catherine excerpted below about 80,000 blogs launching per week reminded me of a story I read yesterday: the Register totalled up the societal costs claimed by various pop-economic doomsayers (e.g. the NCAA tournament costs $X billion in lost productivity; failing to recycle bottle caps costs us $Y billion every week). And guess what? It turns out that the sum is more than the total amount of money in the world.

To be fair, I don't think there's any solid economic reason why that can't be true — but it certainly seems doubtful. To think that spending half an hour watching an NCAA tournament game actually introduces real costs to an individual's employer requires a childlike naivete, wherein every workday contains exactly 8 hours of work, all of which must be completed and all of which is relevant to the company's bottom line. I can understand why one would think such aggregate measures are necessary and plausible at a large scale. But realistically, most of these cost estimates probably ignore a lot of naturally-occurring elasticity in order to make their advocates' pet causes seem more important than they actually are.