Is it Time to Kill the Oxford Comma

Punctuation doesn’t usually trigger strong feelings – unless you’re talking to a writer about the Oxford comma. This little punctuation mark, also known as the serial comma, is used before the word â€Å"and† when you’re listing three or more items. Here’s an example: He bought bread, eggs, and milk at the store. Here’s the same sentence without the comma: He bought bread, eggs and milk at the store. Writer-types tend to fall into one of two passionate camps: those that love the Oxford comma and those that despise it. Since there are no hard-and-fast grammar rules governing its usage, the battle rages on. All Hail the Serial Comma! The Oxford comma has its share of ardent fans, especially in the United States. Most American magazine and book publishers use it, and it’s commonly used in online publications. For proponents like me, the main reason is clarity. In some sentences, omitting the Oxford comma can cause all sorts of misunderstandings: My heroes are my parents, Wonder Woman, and Batman. The inclusion of the comma makes it clear that the writer is listing multiple idols: their parents and two superheroes. Without the comma, things get a bit confusing: My heroes are my parents, Wonder Woman and Batman. The writer may still be listing several idols in this sentence, or they might be letting us know that they have quite a colorful family background. It’s impossible to tell. Comma Detractors Although I’m a huge fan of the Oxford comma, many others, including the editor of this blog, are not! A lot of the time, it can be influenced by where you’re from. American writers tend to favor the Oxford comma but the same doesn’t hold true in other English-speaking countries. Most Australian, Canadian and British stylebooks discourage the use of the Oxford comma. To Comma or Not to Comma: That Is the Question You don’t have to be a die-hard word nerd to have strong feelings about the Oxford comma. It turns out that average Americans are fairly split on the issue. The polling website FiveThirtyEight surveyed over 1,100 American adults to see where they stood. It turns out that 57 percent of respondents were pro-Oxford comma, while 43 percent couldn’t deal with the tyranny of that extra comma. Not exactly a tie, but not a crushing victory for the serial comma either. Although both camps make valid points, I still believe in using the serial comma in most cases, as it often boosts the clarity of a sentence. However, if you’re writing for a client or publication that requires AP Style, follow their guidelines and steer clear of the Oxford comma. But if you’re free to choose, go ahead and make room for it.

Introduction to Purchasing-Power Parity

Introduction to Purchasing-Power Parity The idea that identical items in different countries should have the same real prices is very intuitively appealing- after all, it stands to reason that a consumer should be able to sell an item in one country, exchange the money received for the item for currency of a different country, and then buy the same item back in the other country (and not have any money left over), if for no other reason than this scenario simply puts the consumer back exactly where she started. This concept, known as purchasing-power parity (and sometimes referred to as PPP), is simply the theory that the amount of purchasing power that a consumer has doesnt depend on what currency she is making purchases with. Purchasing-power parity doesnt mean that nominal exchange rates are equal to 1, or even that nominal exchange rates are constant. A quick look at an online finance site shows, for example, that a US dollar can buy about 80 Japanese yen (at the time of writing), and this can vary pretty widely over time. Instead, the theory of purchasing-power parity implies that there is an interaction between nominal prices and nominal exchange rates so that, for example, items in the US that sell for one dollar would sell for 80 yen in Japan today, and this ratio would change in tandem with the nominal exchange rate. In other words, purchasing-power parity states that the real exchange rate is always equal to 1, i.e. that one item purchased domestically can be exchanged for one foreign item. Despite its intuitive appeal, purchasing-power parity doesnt generally hold in practice. This is because purchasing-power parity relies on the presence of arbitrage opportunities- opportunities to risklessly and costlessly buy items at a low price in one place and sell them at a higher price in another- to bring prices together in different countries. (Prices would converge because the buying activity would push prices in one country up and the selling activity would push prices in the other country down.) In reality, there are various transaction costs and barriers to trade that limit the ability to make prices converge via market forces. For example, its unclear how one would exploit arbitrage opportunities for services across different geographies, since its often difficult, if not impossible, to transport services costlessly from one place to another. Nevertheless, purchasing-power parity is an important concept to consider as a baseline theoretical scenario, and, even though purchasing-power parity might not hold perfectly in practice, the intuition behind it does, in fact, place practical limits on how much real prices can diverge across countries. (If you are interested in reading more, see here for another discussion on purchasing-power parity.)