Econlinks for 09-04-’07

YouTube’s favourite clips: an interesting report on what are the de facto most popular clips and why Viacom (and others with similar interests) might have less leverage than they think they have

Mercer’s top 50 highest quality of life cities for ’07. I am happy with position 13 for Amsterdam and I guess Dan Anghel will be quite happy with Lyon on 36… Apparently however, nothing compares to living in Switzerland, Zurich or Geneva to be more precise. I shall think about it :-).

Here’s a wiki list of companies’ names etymologies. The most ‘shocking’ for me (read: had really no clue about this!) is Audi: Latin translation of the German name ‘Horch’. The founder August Horch left the company after five years, but still wanted to manufacture cars. Since the original ‘Horch’ company was still there, he called his new company Audi, the Latin form of his last name. In English it is: “hark!”

Edmund Phelps again with a very interesting article in the WSJ (last time I talked about a previous article of his also there) about entrepreneurship and why this is central to any economy and the corrolary “why European economies lag behind the U.S. “. I think he is missing the bit about the Scandinavian countries, but for the rest I tend to agree: entreprenorial culture is at the very heart of the differential in dynamism…