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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

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Prices

By Matthew Yglesias

Jul 13 2007, 1:50 PM ET Comment



Apropos of yesterday's post on computer prices, it seems that back in 1982, James Fallows paid $4,000 for his computer featuring 64k of RAM plus another $800 for a floppy disk drive. According to the handy CPI calculator on the BLS website, $4,800 in 1982 is equivalent to a bit over $10,000 in today's money.

Naturally, I had no choice but to scroll over to the Apple Store and see how much computer I could get for $10,000. Well, I got myself a Mac Pro with two 3.0 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors, 8 gigs of RAM, four 750 gig hard drives, two Super Drives capable of reading and writing CDs and DVDs, a 30 inch Apple HD Cinema Display, a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse. That comes to $9,449. I believe that's a 128,000-fold in RAM. The improvement in storage capacity is, in some ways, even more impressive.

Photo by Flickr user Rudolf Schuba used under a Creative Commons license

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