Saturday, October 6, 2007

Acemoglu and the Hawking's Value

If you have read any economic blog this week, you know that Daron Acemoglu's book is available on-line. I am sure that its 1,169 pages are excellent and that it will become the standard graduate textbook on economic growth.
However, I can't help thinking about its Hawking's Value (as I've decided to called it). HV goes like this:

HV=number of copies sold or downloaded*(a/b)

a=number of pages of the book;
b=average number of pages actually read and understood.

For instance, Hawking's Brief History of Time sold 10 million copies of 200 pages each, but the number of pages actually read were, say, around 1 (one). Therefore it has a HV= 2,000,000,000, the highest in history . Back to Acemoglu's book: how many pdf files will rest unopened/unread in our hard disks?

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