The lives of most men are determined by their environment. They accept the circumstances a

n, we do not know the names of the earliest composers. Early music was based on single tunes, or melodies.

(84)

The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic.

"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart.

Of all the "old" media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.

Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold— but, as he said last year, "Sometimes rivers dry up." In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.

Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.

Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle. and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meager editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.

In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charitie

onsumer-based society that was concerned only with acquisition. Blue-jeans-wearing rebels of popular movies were an expression of contempt towards the empty and obedient silence of the Cold- War American; the positive images of American consumer society were under siege. What had been a piece of traditional American culture—blue jeans—became a rejection of traditional culture. These images found an eager audience among those for whom gray suits and formal dresses had been elevated as ideals of the age. In blue jeans, men and boys found relief from the underlying harness required to fit into more formal water. Even some among the middle class slipped into jeans for a sleepy afternoon on the porch.

ess stable than America's"? (Para.3)

gh the second phase of childhood, also called as old age. This is the phase where everyone needs a comfort of a sense of belonging and being taken care of. Wouldn't we all expect the same of security when we grow old? Even our parents are expecting us to be their caretaker, as they grow old. But they never make that obvious to us.

______

Estate". (para.6)

years later it sheds far more on an issue of great interest: the pace of mankind's material progress. In a new paper, William Nordhaus of Yale University starts by asking what may seem a dull question: do statisticians measure prices accurately? To find out, he studies the economic history of light from Neolithic times to the present. His answer and its implications are startling.

Traditional estimates have failed to track the fall in the price of light, especially over the past 200 years. As a result, they overstate today's price, relative to the price in 1800, not by a few percentage points, nor even by a factor of one or two, but by a factor of about 1000. Even by the standards of economics, that is a large error. The implications are of corresponding size. If the prices of other things are measured as badly as the price of light, it follows that traditional estimates of economic growth are way off the mark.

Economists are familiar with the difficulty of measuring changes in prices over time. It seems easy to measure the price of, say, a ball-point pen. But suppose that. a new version comes along that costs twice as much and lasts four times as long. If it catches on, the price of a pen has doubled—but the price of pen-services, as it were, has halved. This second price is the one that should be used to calculate the change in living standards. However, it is often difficult to observe. You need to know not just the change in the prices of the goods but also the change in the services that the goods provide. Measuring that is especially hard when the range of services itself changes over time. (Compare the communication-services provided by a modern telephone with those of one from the 1950s, for instance.)

Mr. Nordhaus points out that light has a useful property in this respect. Its service— illumination—does not vary. Babylonians used lamps for much the same reason that modern Americans use incandescent bulbs. With diligence and great ingenuity, Mr. Nordhaus has collected data on the light-services provided down the ages by: burning sticks; fat-and-oil- burning lamps; candles (tallow, sperm-oil, etc); gas lights (various); kerosene lamps; and the many different kinds of electric light. (The unit of measurement is the lumen; a wax candle emits about 13 lumens, a modern 100-watt bulb on 110 bolts about 1,200.) Mr. Nordhaus has also collected data on the prices of these sources of light: the price of a candle, the price of a given quantity of gas or electricity, and so on.

Putting the two together yields a true measure for the price of light. In nominal terms, the price of 1,000 lumen-hours has fallen from about 40 cents in 1800 to about one-tenth of a cent today. The black line in the chart plots this series as an index. (The sharp fall at the end of the line marks the introduction of the compact fluorescent bulb.) In real terms, of course, the fall is even sharper: 40 cents in 1800 is worth more than $4 in today's money. Compare this with a price series calculated using the conventional methods of official statistics—that is, by looking at the prices of goods that provide light rather than at the price of light itself. Mr. Nordhaus stitches together such a series from a variety of official sources. According to this measure, the price of light has fallen in real terms since 1800, but has gone up by 180% in nominal terms (as shown by the white line in the chart). In other words, conventional estimates would put the price of light in 1800 at about four-hundredths of a cent per 1,000 lumen-hour. Mr. Nordhaus' first series shows that the price of light in 1800 was about 1,000 times dearer than that.

This staggering difference is par@ an illustration of the effect of compound interest. It represents a drift of roughly 3.6% a year between the official and the t