Well, after struggling through last week wheezing and coughing, my GP has diagnosed me with pneumonia caused by a chest infection. So I'm stuck at home, with a choice of either reading, or entering the purgatory otherwise known as watching daytime TV. So it's a good job that I have plenty of books on hand…

Now this is a good little book about practical economics. It basically discusses the application of the two-engine paradox (the paradox that a aeroplane which has 2 engines, and needs both to fly, is twice as likely to suffer a disasterous engine failure as a plane with one engine) to family budgetting: families which, a generation ago, had only one income, now have two: but, far from making them more ecomonically independent, this has greatly reduced their margin of safety.

The book is entirely about the situation in America, so it's conclusions would undoubtedly be very different for Europe. America is a strange place; what is the point in living in a country with such strong economic growth if none of the benefits go to the average man on the street (inflation-adjusted median wages in America have been virtually static for 33 years).

This book is basically about the US housing boom, and how — far from being underpinned by rising wealth and genuine supply shortages as the UK boom is — this is mainly an artificial situation created by dual incomes and school admissions zoning. The book is clearly advocating a single point of view, and goes out of its way to try and absolve the public of any blame for overspending at all; it's very partisan. But it makes it's case well, the statistics are good, and there are very few books that try to investigate long-term family economic trends in this way.

Is CNN trying to put The Onion out of business?

There seems to be a lack of a good standard single-process, multiple-connections server module for perl. I couldn't find one yesterday, anyway (Net::Daemon can only handle multiple connections simultaneously if you have a threads-enabled perl). So I have written one: Net::SelectServer. It used select to multiplex different clients, and it's protocol-neutral, so should work with more than just TCP sockets.

The difference between sensationalism and raising a serious issue is this: sensationalism is where you state your story using the worst case interpretation of the statistics, without explaining this to the reader — or just plain misinterpretation. Serious discussion of a real issue is where you quote statistics that show there is a problem even under conservative assumptions.

So it is disappointing to see the usually excellent Motley Fool veering into sensationalism with its articles on consumer credit. So what if consumer credit has quadrupled in 12 years? — that tells us nothing without allowing for inflation and economic growth.

Their starting figure for 1993, 53 billion pounds, is about 8.3% of 1993's GDP. Their estimated figure for 2005 is 193 billion pounds, about 16.2% of estimated current GDP. So it would be entirely sensible to say that consumer debt had doubled; and that is enough to say it's a growing problem. Saying that it has quadrupled, OTOH, is misleading, and is exactly the sort of thing that gives statistics a bad name.