Economics

What’s Your House Worth?

This entry was posted in Economics on by

Try out Zillow.com.
I asked it about my street and in less than 30 seconds it has popped up estimated values for my street and about 40 more houses surrounding us. You’ll quibble with the values because, well, your house is obviously worth much more than that house next door.
Quibbles aside, this site provides a wealth of pricing information, trends, comparables and the opportunity to fine tune the estimated value of any property. What it is missing is the expert eye of an appraiser assessing a properties current condition.
More info here and a this update:

Six hours after Zillow.com, a Seattle-based Web site that offers free home valuations, launched its beta version Wednesday, the site crashed under the onslaught of 300,000 page views. It was out for several hours.
“What caught us by surprise is how much people used it and how deeply they used it,” company spokeswoman Amy Bohutinsky said.

The Zillow Blog has updates and lots of folks are reporting on how it worked for them.

Even though they are still in beta using the service will be well worth your time if you are buying or selling residential real estate.

Helping Folks Choose a Hospital

This entry was posted in Economics Health Care on by

If you are on Medicare and need certain procedures performed you might be better off to choose a highly ranked hospital (Free Reg):

A health-care rating company here said today that patients treated at hospitals that receive its top ranking have a 27% lower risk of dying during their hospital stay.
Moreover, according to HealthGrades, which compiles quality report cards on hospitals and doctors and sells those reports to consumers, patients treated at its top-ranked hospitals also have a 14% lower risk of complications.
HealthGrades used the Medicare discharge records from 2002, 2003 and 2004 to rank hospitals based on overall performance of risk-adjusted outcomes associated with 26 common Medicare inpatient procedures and diagnoses.

But why does the MedPage Today Action Point (included with each MedPage article) say this?

Explain to patients who ask that HealthGrades is a private company. Its rankings system is not sanctioned by federal or state government.

Does this mean that we should find the ranking system more trustworthy? That is certainly the way I interpret this. The staff writer and reviewer could have done a bit better.
Most of HealthGrades’ rankings are based on Medicare patients so it is not clear that the results can be extended to younger patients though I’d certainly use this information to help with such decisions.

BTW, where is the google of health care? We need rating and evaluation systems that lets us, the consumers, evaluate hospital and individual physicians based on fees, performance and customer ratings.

The End of the ‘Best Of’ Discs?

This entry was posted in Economics Information Internet Music Technology on by

Ann Althouse asks the vital question:

Should we care if iTunes is killing the marking for “best of” music collections?

My immediate response I don’t care if best of collections fade into history. I don’t buy them.
Let’s, though, take this as a serious question and read the linked article. We need only read part way down the first page to see that Ann’s question distorts the article which posits a hypothetical question:

What if fans who might have paid for a full album of “the very best” of an established act instead choose to pay substantially less and simply buy the very, very best song?

And, after discussing various aspects of the question they get to this:

In many instances, however, record executives say online sales do not appear to be hurting their best sellers.

It appears that for, at least the folks with a substantive set of work, the best ofs will be successful for some time more. And, if a one/two hit wonder’s best of sales plummet to zero, well, great! This is as it should be and the saved money will be spent on something else.

Creative destruction in action.