House price roller-coaster

Headlines from the same site, within days of each other: House prices to double by 2025. UK house prices will fall by up to 50%. (note: even the "optimistic" headline is not such great news- 2025 is 20 years from now, which implies average house price increased of about 3-4% for the next 20 years...pretty dead, when compared to what's happened for the last 15 years.)

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MBA rankings tarnishing the Economist Intelligence Unit

Via a post by Julian, I learn that the Economist Intelligence Unit has ranked Barcelona-based IESE as the number one MBA program in the world.

The salient quote:

IESE topped the EIU’s list because it scored particularly well in two categories: opening new career opportunities, and the starting salaries of its new graduates (their average—of $142,000—was higher than that at any American school).

This seems to me to be TOTALLY wrong: such a huge exaggeration that either people surveyed were lying, or someone at the Economist made a catastrophic error in their Excel spreadsheet (maybe multiplied by 2 by mistake?).

I have several friends who attended IESE, and one from the most recent graduating class once mentioned that peers were getting offers in the range of 90,000 Euros outside of Spain, and 55,000 Euros in Spain, and that *most* of the graduates were staying in Spain.

In addition, anybody who knows a minimum about salaries in Spain would know that $142,000 for a 1st year MBA is laughably high.

Now, I have nothing against IESE the school, and couldn't care less whether it's ranked 1 or 1000 in the list of MBA programs.

But it does sort of bother me that the school seems to have done nothing to correct what is so obviously a big mistake. If you google "IESE salary", the first result is the EIU's MBA ranking page, and the second result a press release from the IESE website lauding the survey and reprinting the same salary estimate! That to me, if they themselves know these numbers are wrong, seems to be borderline unethical. It's great to celebrate good news about yourself, but not at the price of propagating mistaken or false information.

Even worse is seeing the EIU mess up so badly. I generally trust the numbers from the EIU and respect their work a great deal, but this mistake, especially the longer it goes uncorrected, sharply reduces their credibility in my eyes. Next time I'm reading some forecast about the Czech market, for example, I'll be much less likely to accept their numbers or point-of-view.

UPDATE: A reader has sent me a brochure from the IESE website with data from the 2004 class. You can see below that the average salaries are all clearly below $142,000. So unless one of this year's graduates won a multi-million Euro record contract or professional football contract, and skewed the average grossly upward, then it's increasingly obvious that the figures are *wrong*, and that IESE, but particularly, the Economist Intelligence Unit, should correct them.

On a separate thread, I find it rather weird that Spain, which has been in the EU for almost 15 years, and in the Euro since day 1, still pays its MBAs the same wages as Eastern European countries which have just joined. You'd think there would have been more convergence with Western European salaries by now, no?

UPDATE2: Hmm...another reader points out that the Western European number might be entirely skewed by the fact that all the high-paying banking jobs in Europe are pretty much in London (where on top of it you earn in Pounds). Fair point...

UPDATE3: My server logs today show traffic to this specific post coming from search engines. Curious, I noticed that a search for "Economist Intelligence Unit" results in this post being on the first page of results of Google Blog Search, Technorati, and Blogger Search. The same is true for searches of "IESE".

Are people from the EIU not paying attention to what is being said about them in the blogosphere? I'm curious: if I'm wrong, shouldn't I be informed so I can correct this post? And if I'm right, shouldn't there be a correction in the data that make up the rankings?

What seems to me to be the worst outcome is silence. One reader who emailed me said he was considering applying for an MBA next year- should he and others make decisions based on bad data that has *knowingly* not been corrected? And should the EIU really allow people like me and others to increasingly distrust the quality of their research output?

UPDATE4: Sigh....I've gotten some emails from people asking why I hate IESE, and even warning me not to mess with a school owned by Opus Dei. Well, I also read the Da Vinci Code, so let the record stand that if anybody sees me being led off by some sinister-looking hunchback monk, to call Tom Hanks or Audrey Tautou quickly!

So to repeat from when I first wrote this post: I have nothing at all against IESE!

But I do think it's the right thing to do to try to draw attention to data that are so obviously, *factually*  wrong. Especially when the data are being disseminated by a brand that I care for. And yes, I care for the Economist brand because I think they do a great, professional job of representing a classically liberal point-of-view that I think is important.


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Mobile TV coming to Spain

The PaidContent folks find that Nokia will soon be starting a huge drive to push Mobile TV in the Spanish market. Should be interesting. Hope the operators don't kill it from day 1 with unrealistic pricing. Link: MocoNews.net: mobile content news.

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Quote of the day

"The sum of [Google's potential] market, if you include the large and small companies throughout the world, is the world's gross domestic product."

- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

I'm starting to get bored with this Google takes over the world theme, particularly when they themselves are out there pushing it. I preferred the underdog, humble, pre-IPO version of Google.

Link: Guardian Unlimited Technology.

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The Economist on Pay-per-call

The Economist talks about the future of online advertising, and squarely validates the potential of pay-per-call by calling it "the next step" after the pay-per-click model which is working so well.

It then talks about pay-per-sale being the "holy grail" of advertising, because this would be the ultimate performance-based marketing. No advertising wasted at all. Yet the example they cite, Bill Gross' snap, appears to be having a hard time taking off. Too far ahead of its time perhaps?

Link: Online advertising | Pay per sale | Economist.com (warning: must be subscriber to access this article)

UPDATE: Pamela Parker has a great article on Pay-per-call. Check it out

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Lots of Brazilians

Wherever you stand politically, this is still good for a laugh. Thanks, Mark!

Donald Rumsfeld is giving President Bush his daily briefing, and concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed in an accident" "Oh No", the President exclaims. "That's terrible". His staff sit there, stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President slumps, head in hands. Finally the President looks up and asks... "How many is a brazillion?"

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Beta testing WordPress.com

I've been beta testing the new WordPress.com service and my initial impressions are that it's easy to use and reasonably quick, but offers nothing special or new (no Purple Cow here). Two or three years ago this would have been revolutionary, launching this today I have to wonder why anyone would go for it over TypePad. Maybe they have other, more innovative features in the pipeline?

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Spanish broadband update

Spain looks set to take a huge leap forward in the broadband wars. Jazztel has launched ADSL2+ this week in Sevilla, with rapid roll-out planned for the rest of Spain's big cities by November.

The offer looks really good: 29.95 Euros for 20 meg down/1 meg up, and 24/7 free local/national calls. You can also transfer the 12.95 Euro line rental as well, removing the need to keep getting a bill from Telefonica. (details here)

Apparently there will be a TV-over-DSL offer added a few months later.

UPDATE: Just read in the UK papers that Be is launching this week with an offer of 24 meg ADSL2+ for 24 pounds (about $40 US). Nice!

This makes reading Om's latest post about US broadband almost unbelievable. Covad selling 6 meg for $108?! Earthlink pushing 8 meg for $70?! And these are meant to be the "exciting" new deals. How executives from these companies (and all the RBOCS & cablecos) can pretend they are giving American consumers good deals is beyond me when one just has to look abroad to see how far behind the US is falling.

UPDATE2: It seems that Wanadoo in Spain are doubling their broadband speeds this month. This will take their best offer to 36 Euros + VAT for 4 meg ADSL + unlimited local/national voice. Not a bad deal, but I have to wonder why anyone would opt for this offer over Jazztel's

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Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

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Live Long and Prosper

Wow, who knew 2018 would be such a special year?

Looks like that's the target date for building the first space elevator.

And also is the target year NASA has set for the next manned moon mission.

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