How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia

By STEPHEN MOORE 

Harold Hamm, discoverer of the Bakken fields of the northern Great Plains, on

English: Flag of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

America's oil future and why OPEC's days are numbered.

Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be "completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century."

"President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy," he adds. We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into "green energy" sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas.

You'd expect an oilman to make the "drill, baby, drill" pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation's fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers.

How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: "No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels."

If he's right, that'll double America's proven oil reserves. "Bakken is almost twice as big as the oil reserve in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska," he continues. According to Department of Energy data, North Dakota is on pace to surpass California in oil production in the next few years. Mr. Hamm explains over lunch in Washington, D.C., that the more his company drills, the more oil it finds. Continental Resources has seen its "proved reserves" of oil and natural gas (mostly in North Dakota) skyrocket to 421 million barrels this summer from 118 million barrels in 2006.

"We expect our reserves and production to triple over the next five years." And for those who think this oil find is only making Mr. Hamm rich, he notes that today in America "there are 10 million royalty owners across the country" who receive payments for the oil drilled on their land. "The wealth is being widely shared."
One reason for the renaissance has been OPEC's erosion of market power. "For nearly 50 years in this country nobody looked for oil here and drilling was in steady decline. Every time the domestic industry picked itself up, the Saudis would open the taps and drown us with cheap oil," he recalls. "They had unlimited production capacity, and company after company would go bust."

Zina Saunders

Today OPEC's market share is falling and no longer dictates the world price. This is huge, Mr. Hamm says. "Finally we have an opportunity to go out and explore for oil and drill without fear of price collapse." When OPEC was at its peak in the 1990s, the U.S. imported about two-thirds of its oil. Now we import less than half of it, and about 40% of what we do import comes from Mexico and Canada. That's why Mr. Hamm thinks North America can achieve oil independence.

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The Weekend Interview with Harold Hamm: How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia - WSJ.com

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Get A Job: The Craigslist Experiment

By Eric Auld 

I am a 26-year-old with a Master’s degree in English. I am currently looking for a full-time job, preferably in a major city, since that’s where a vast multitude of jobs exist.
Unfortunately, so do an even vaster multitude of job-seekers.

Why would I ever want a full-time job, you may ask? Because I am currently an Adjunct Lecturer in English, which means part-time employment, which means a lim

Craigslist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

ited amount of classes per semester, which means no steady work during summer or winter breaks, which means no health benefits and barely enough money to pay rent, utilities, car insurance, student loans, etc.

I know, I know: “Why expect a full-time job with a Humanities degree?” you ask. But that’s not the discussion I want to start today. I just want to focus on the masses for a moment.
We all know the story: for a long time now, the U.S. job market has been in the toilet. The national unemployment rate is now 8.1%, though it is ever-steadily creeping its way back up the drain, as unemployment was 9.1% just one year ago. Still, for many (especially for my post-collegiate generation), coming across full-time employment is like finding one specific needle in a stack of billions of other needles.
But you know this already.

I shouldn’t complain too much because I have a Master’s degree and employers are more likely to at least acknowledge my résumé because of this. (Well, I hope so.) But what of the Bachelor’s degree? The Associate’s? The High School Diploma? My guess: the lesser the degree, the less likely a possible employer will schedule an interview. But that’s just my guess, as I am not an HR representative of any sort.

A Point of View: What would Keynes do?

What would John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the 20th Century, have made of the current economic situation, ponders philosopher John Gray.
"I can see us as water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents underneath."

That was how John Maynard Keynes, speaking in 1938 in a talk later published as his brilliant memoir My Early Beliefs, recalled his younger self and his friends in the Bloomsbury Group as they had been in the years before World War I.

• John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was educated at Eton and Cambridge University, where he studied mathematics
• He became friends with members of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals and artists
• Keynes joined the Treasury during World War I, and in the wake of the 1919 Versailles peace treaty, published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, criticising exorbitant war reparations demanded from Germany, claiming they would harm the country's economy and could foster a desire for revenge
• During inter-war years, Keynes became a prominent arts patron
• His best-known work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, made Keynes Britain's most influential economist
• Keynes led 1944 British delegation to the Bretton Woods conference in the United States, playing an important role in planning the World Bank and International Monetary Fund

The influential Cambridge economist has figured prominently in the anxious debates that have gone on since the crash of 2007-2008. For most of those invoking his name, he was a kind of social engineer, who urged using the power of government to lift the economy out of the devastating depression of the 30s.

Find out more

• John Gray is a political philosopher and author of
  False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism

• Listen to A Point of View on the iPlayer
• BBC Podcasts - A Point of View
• Four Thought podcast

That is how Keynes's disciples view him today. The fashionable cult of austerity, they warn, has forgotten Keynes's most important insight - slashing government spending when credit is scarce only plunges the economy into deeper recession.

What is needed now, they believe, is what Keynes urged in the 30s - governments must be ready to borrow more, print more money and invest in public works in order to restart growth.
But would Keynes be today what is described as a Keynesian? Would this supremely subtle and sceptical mind still believe that policies he formulated long ago - which worked well in the decades after the World War II - can solve our problems now?

Continue reading the story ...

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Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement

Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos

TERESA GHILARDUCCI writes in the newyork times.

"I WORK on retirement policy, so friends often want to talk about their own retirement plans and prospects. While I am happy to have these conversations, my friends usually walk away feeling worse — for good reason.

Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts. The specter of downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle- and higher-income workers. Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day. 

 

How YouTube's Global Platform Is Redefining the Entertainment Business

BY: DANIELLE SACKS @ fastcompany.com

Maximum cool: YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar (front) and his team: Margaret Stewart (user experience), Shishir Mehrotra (monetization), Hunter Walk (product), and Robert Kyncl (TV and film) | Photographs by Robyn Twomey

 

 

YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar and his team have transformed Google's Folly into a mind-blowing -- and lucrative -- global platform that is redefining the entertainment business.

YouTube says 94 of the top 100 brand advertisers have now run campaigns on the platform, and what's attracting them is the increasing body of research that shows that advertising on YouTube works. According to an effectiveness study by the U.K. firm Decipher Media Research, promoted videos -- video ads that appear prominently on YouTube's search-results page, competing with the content that users have searched for -- triple unaided brand awareness.

These results have yielded two insights -- that ads should be content and that any ad a user chooses is quite resonant -- and those have helped inform Mehrotra's latest initiative, which seeks to overhaul the way ads are consumed and sold on the site. TrueView, as it's known, gives viewers the option to skip an ad entirely -- but charges advertisers a premium if their content is chosen and watched the whole way through. (Another TrueView option, akin to part of Hulu's ad program, lets users choose one of a slate of ads to watch.) Nissan, Sony Pictures, and Ultimate Fighting Championship have been early adopters.

"We [the industry] want the new 30-second spot," says Publicis's Scheppach, who runs a group that's pioneering new ad models for emerging media. Based on her research, there's "300% to 400% improvement of advertising value if you pick the ad," she says.

Ultimately, Google sees this idea of "cost-per-view" advertising spreading even to its display-ad business (already driving $2.5 billion in annual revenue, of which YouTube has been called a significant but unspecified part). During Advertising Week in New York, where TrueView debuted, Google predicted that by 2015, 50% of display ads will include video, while 75% will have a social component. Most important, the company anticipates that these innovations could help make display advertising a $50 billion industry.

Read more here.

 

 

 

The China Paradox

How should Americans understand a country that presents itself as simultaneously weak and strong?

BY CHRISTINA LARSON @ foreignpolicy.com

Until recently, the Chinese paradox that most puzzled Western audiences was how to understand a country that is both communist and hyper-capitalist. But that is hardly the only, or even the most striking, paradox of the modern Middle Kingdom. China is fast on its way to becoming a global superpower, even as it grapples with such enormous domestic challenges as supplying enough energy to keep its cities lit, absorbing millions of rural migrants into cities each year, reining in choking pollution, creating a social safety net, and attempting to lift millions out of poverty. Although China holds $1 trillion in U.S. debt, its per capita GDP is still roughly one-tenth that of the United States. Beijing is subsidizing China's fast-growing clean-tech export industry, even as the skies above the country's largest cities remain a hazy gray. Such seeming contradictions are dazzlingly confusing to outsiders -- and sometimes to China's own leaders.

Yet, this recent show of confidence is making some in Beijing nervous. Although from a distance China's Communist government may appear a decision-making monolith, in fact a variety of voices are now arguing about the country's future direction -- and what face to show foreigners -- as Council on Foreign Relations scholar Elizabeth Economy documented in her recent Foreign Policyarticle, "The End of the Peaceful Rise?" While all good mandarins take pride in their country's growing economic and geopolitical clout, some critics within China worry that inflated pride comes before a fall. Ye Hailin, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, for instance, recently pointed out what he sees as flaws in current domestic sensibilities: "Three decades of reform have led to a rapid increase of wealth in China, and this in turn has also made the Chinese people arrogant. ...The Chinese people are no longer tolerant of criticisms."

 

But refusing to accept criticism is not necessarily the same thing as thinking of oneself as a superpower. At least China's citizenry, for all their surging patriotism, aren't yet buying that line. One interesting paradox about how Chinese and American people see China was evident in two recent polls. Americans tend to exaggerate China's economic strength (and presumed threat to U.S. stature), while Chinese tend to downplay news of their rising power. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, nearly half of Americans -- 47 percent -- named China as the world's top economic power (though, in fact, China's economy is about one-third the size of that of the United States). That's up significantly from early 2008, when 30 percent of Americans made the same claim. Meanwhile, when asked whether China was a "superpower," only 12 percent of Chinese people agreed in a recent poll by state-run Global Times newspaper. It's a good reminder that not only is China home to vast wealth and poverty, but also home to a range of views, ever-evolving.

Read more here.

 

The Worst Mistake America Made After 9/11: How focusing too much on the war on terror undermined our economy and global power.

By Anne Applebaum @ Slate.com

We reacted to 9/11 with the war on terror. Was it a huge mistake?

 

On Sept. 11, 2001, the post-Cold War era that began so euphorically on Nov. 9, 1989, abruptly ended. The long decade that stretched from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the World Trade Center was marked by military spending cuts, domestic political scandals, and a general sense that American foreign policy was adrift. President George H.W. Bush had talked of the "New World Order" but had no policy to fit the clever phrase. President Bill Clinton had a clutch of policies but never found a neat way to describe them.

In the wake of al-Qaida's attack on New York and Washington, an organizing principle suddenly presented itself. Like the Cold War, the new "war on terror," as it instantly became known, clearly defined America's friends, enemies, and priorities. Like the Cold War, the war on terror appealed both to American idealism and to American realism. We were fighting genuine bad guys, but the destruction of al-Qaida also lay clearly within the sphere of our national interests. The speed with which we all adopted this new paradigm was impressive, if somewhat alarming. At the time, I marveled at the neatness and cleanliness of this New New World Order and observed "how like an academic article everything suddenly appears to be."

 

In our single-minded focus on Islamic fanaticism, we missed, for example, the transformation of China from a commercial power into an ambitious political power. We failed to appreciate the significance of economic growth in China's neighborhood, too. When President George W. Bush traveled in Asia in the wake of 9/11, he spoke to his Malaysian and Indonesia interlocutors about their resident terrorist cells. His Chinese colleagues, meanwhile, talked business and trade.

We also missed, at least initially, the transformation of Russia from a weak and struggling partner into a sometimes hostile opponent. Through the lens of the war on terror, Vladimir Putin, president of Russia in 2001, looked like an ally. He, too, was fighting terrorists, in Chechnya. Though his was quite a different war against quite different terrorists (and not only against terrorists), for a brief period he nevertheless convinced his American counterparts that his struggle and their struggle were more or less the same thing.

 

Thanks to the war on terror, we missed what might have been a historic chance to make a deal on immigration with Mexico. Because all of Latin America was irrelevant to the war on terror, we lost interest in, and influence on, that region, too. The same goes for Africa, with the exception of those countries with al-Qaida cells. In the Arab world, we aligned ourselves closely with authoritarian regimes because we believed they would help us fight Islamic terrorism, despite the fact that their authoritarianism was an inspiration to fanatical Islamists. If we are now treated with suspicion in place like Egypt and Tunisia, that is part of the explanation.

Finally, we stopped investing in our own infrastructure—think what $3 trillion could have done for roads, research, education, or even private investment, if a part of that sum had just been left in taxpayers' pockets—and we missed the chance to rethink our national energy policy. After 9/11, the president could have gone to the nation, declared an emergency, explained that wars would have to be fought and would have to be paid for—perhaps, appropriately, through a gasoline tax. He would have had enormous support. It's hard to remember now, but I could just about fill the tank of my car for $20 back in 2001. At the time, I'd have been happy to make it $21 if it helped the marines in Afghanistan. Instead, the president cut taxes and increased defense spending. We are only now paying the price.

 

Continue reading here.

 

The True Cost of 9/11: Trillions and trillions wasted on wars, a fiscal catastrophe, a weaker America.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz @ project-syndicate.org

The 9/11 attacks led to two wars and out-of-control U.S. spending

The September 11, 2001, terror attacks by Al Qaeda were meant to harm the United States, and they did, but in ways that Osama bin Laden probably never imagined. President George W. Bush’s response to the attacks compromised America’s basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.

The attack on Afghanistan that followed the 9/11 attacks was understandable, but the subsequent invasion of Iraq was entirely unconnected to Al Qaeda – as much as Bush tried to establish a link. That war of choice quickly became very expensive – orders of magnitude beyond the $60 billion claimed at the beginning – as colossal incompetence met dishonest misrepresentation.

Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America’s war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3-5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50% of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans’ medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health-care costs will total $600-900 billion. But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.

Today, America is focused on unemployment and the deficit. Both threats to America’s future can, in no small measure, be traced to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increased defense spending, together with the Bush tax cuts, is a key reason why America went from a fiscal surplus of 2% of GDP when Bush was elected to its parlous deficit and debt position today. Direct government spending on those wars so far amounts to roughly $2 trillion – $17,000 for every US household – with bills yet to be received increasing this amount by more than 50%.

Moreover, as Bilmes and I argued in our book The Three Trillion Dollar War, the wars contributed to America’s macroeconomic weaknesses, which exacerbated its deficits and debt burden. Then, as now, disruption in the Middle East led to higher oil prices, forcing Americans to spend money on oil imports that they otherwise could have spent buying goods produced in the US.

But then the US Federal Reserve hid these weaknesses by engineering a housing bubble that led to a consumption boom. It will take years to overcome the excessive indebtedness and real-estate overhang that resulted.

Continue reading here.

In Case of Tech Bubble, Do Not Break Glass

Even if bloated valuations of Facebook and Groupon point to another bubble bound to burst, the Fed shouldn't head it off but prepare for the fallout

By Chris Farrell @ businessweek.com

POSITIVE SIDE OF SPECULATION

Among those benefits are entrepreneurial risk-taking and the animal spirits of innovation. "I do not feel confident that a policy which, in the pursuit of stability of prices, output, and employment, had nipped in the bud the railway boom of the forties, or the American railway boom of 1869-71, or the German electrical boom of the [1890s], would have been on balance beneficial to the populations concerned," wrote the British economist Dennis Robertson in 1926. Arthur Rolnick, former head of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and currently senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, agrees with the Robertsonian point of view: "Sure, there's speculation, but this is how we want markets to work," Rolnick says. "It's the way we innovate and bring new products to market."

Not all innovations are desirable, of course, as we've seen recently. Much of the whiz-bang financial technology that made the housing bubble possible turned out to be toxic. Still, even if economists can agree on a set of statistical guideposts for determining the madness of crowds, monetary policy is often too blunt a policy instrument. Sure, the Fed can always pop a bubble by sharply hiking the fed funds rate. But that will also stymie angel investors, venture capitalists, and other intrepid investors from funding profitable ideas bubbling up from university labs and corporate research departments.

"The Fed raising the fed funds rate to deal with a bubble in one sector of the economy isn't very smart," says David Laidler, economist at the University of Western Ontario. "Whether the problem is in high tech or in housing, you're using an economy-wide instrument to deal with it, which isn't wise."

THE CANADIAN MODEL

The solution, many economists agree, is for the Fed to place a far greater emphasis on regulatory initiative than monetary policy when confronting bubbles.

Take the new mortgage rules announced by Canadian finance minister Jim Flaherty on Jan. 17. For the second time in less a year, the Canadian government acted to lean against ballooning consumer debt in a low interest rate environment to "protect the stability of the economy." In sharp contrast, when the stock market entered nosebleed territory in the late 1990s, the Fed ignored calls to raise margin requirements in the stock market, a targeted regulatory move.

During the real estate bubble, federal regulators had plenty of tools at their disposable to cut short the widespread abuses. Edward Gramlich, the late Federal Reserve governor, repeatedly warned about abuses in the subprime mortgage market and urged that the Greenspan Fed unleash investigators on lenders trolling for customers in poor neighborhoods and examine in detail their relations with major financial institutions. The Greenspan Fed, enamored with the elixir of deregulation, ignored his advice. "Regulators didn't do their job," says Rolnick.

Indeed, the Securities & Exchange Commission should step up its scrutiny of private investors and company valuations in the growing trading market for private share offerings of such marquee high-tech companies as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Even more important, the Fed needs to exercise the extra oversight powers it got in the Frank-Dodd financial services reform legislation last July. (And Congress should avoid watering down the rules and regulations.)

Here's the thing: Plenty of mobile Internet companies, social networking firms, and other information technology companies will get funded over the next few years. Many of them will fail. That's capitalism. Regulators need to concentrate on preventing major financial institutions from feeding the frenzy and putting the taxpayer at risk. That's regulatory prudence. Stay tuned.

 

Is this the start of the second dotcom bubble?

 

 

Infographic: Labor Day

With all the hot dogs and beer, it’s easy to forget the labor part of Labor Day. Here, a look at the labor force, past and present, starting with 1971, when the microprocessor was introduced and we began our crawl away from manufacturing and toward the service-driven economy of today. | By Rachel Z. Arndt

[Illustraton by Francesco Franchi] [Source]

How Mobile Phones Jump-Start Developing Economies

BY ANTONIO REGALADO @ technologyreview.com

 

Ubiquitous handsets introduce mobile payments to those who lack bank accounts.

 

Virtual wallet: A store in Quito, Ecuador, is one of dozens in the country testing Mony, a way for merchants and suppliers to exchange money by text message. Most Ecuadorians have cell phones but lack bank accounts and must spend time traveling to pay bills in cash. 

Credit: Mony/YellowPepper

 

As one of the fastest-spreading technologies in history, the mobile phone has been transformative for the billions of people in the developing world who never had a landline or an Internet connection. One of the most unexpected benefits is its ability to deliver banking services.

Veronica Suarez, like some 2.5 billion other adults on the planet, has no bank account of her own. Suarez and her husband run a small grocery store in Quito, Ecuador, a city of about 1.4 million people on a plateau ringed with dormant volcanoes. In the past, she would often spend half a day traveling to pay bills in cash. But since June, she has been testing a mobile banking service called Mony, which is run by the Panama-based startup YellowPepper Holding. Now she can simply type out text messages that zap payments to the phones of the delivery men who bring cases of Coca-Cola and boxes of vegetable oil to her shop. That could enable her to save travel time, reduce the risk of getting robbed, and run her business more efficiently.

Continue reading here.

 

 

30-second snapshot: the U.S. and China

Big Think Editors @ bigthink.com [Source]

 

China is shaping up to be one of America's primary competitors in the future global economy. The infographics below provide an entry-level fact base for putting the growing rivalry into perspective.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Source]

 

How Nouriel Roubini Foresaw The Financial Crisis

Big Think Editors @ bigthink.com

 

New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini famously predicted the most recent global financial crisis well before most of his peers did. He says he did this simply by looking at the data and considering it in the context of past bubbles. Roubini recently spoke with Big Think about how to see what’s really happening—even when most people don't agree with you.

The economic bubble (and burst) can be a lesson in avoiding group think, explains Roubini.  “The issue is not why myself or a few others got them, but why most the people, not just economists, don’t see them coming,” he says of the data of a looming economic collapse that should have set off more alarms.  The key problem, he says, is when there is a an economic bubble, “everybody lives in a bubble ... They don’t live in reality and they delude themselves.”
 
To see a bubble from the inside, Roubini adds, it’s important not to get blinded by your own incentive. "It’s very hard to be independent and speak the truth, even if you can be very smart," he says, if your pay is tied to the results you are expected to produce.  Independence from the results provides a clearer picture, he notes.

 

Continue reading here.

 

Why Are Modern Cars So Expensive?

 Mike Allen @  Popular Mechanics points out that cars have never been cheap, but with the ubiquity of computers and electronics, taking a car to the shop is more expensive than ever.

The Price of Progress

Then: Tapered Roller Wheel Bearing Set
Cost: $20
Now: Sealed Wheel Bearing Set
Cost: $150

Sealed tapered roller bearings are not only structurally stronger, they also don't require periodic greasing or fussy clearance adjustments. And they allow the manufacturer to streamline the production—no mess or adjusting, just slap the cartridge onto the spindle in seconds. Upside for the consumer: They generally last the life of the car. 

Then: Key
Cost: $2.99
Now: Key Fob
Cost: $299 and up

The compelling reason for high-end key fobs is antitheft. The better fobs use a rolling code with millions of passwords that change with every start. Remote and proximity unlocking are just gravy. Seeing as how it's considered a luxury item, you pay through the nose. Work-around: Look in the aftermarket or on eBay for replacements, although you may still require the dealer to program it. 

Then: Traditional Mineral-Based ATF
Cost: $2.99/qt
Now: Synthetic ATF +5
Cost: $7.99/qt

Higher underhood temperatures, locking torque converters with more heat-producing friction and the lowered maintenance expectations of consumers make car manufacturers specify synthetic fluid for use in their automatic transmissions. And many vehicles use as much as 12 to 14 quarts. Upside: The expensive stuff is supposed to last for the life of the vehicle. 

Then: Your Right Foot
Cost: Free
Now: ABS Controller
Cost: $600 and up

ABS controllers contain not only a lot of complicated electronics, but delicate high-pressure pumps to cycle the brakes off and on and eliminate locked wheels under braking. Rarely, a skillful driver can match the ABS's prowess, but who has that presence of mind in a panic stop? Aside from the controller, there are tone wheels and sensors that also need occasional replacement. 

Then: Sealed-Beam Headlight
Cost: 4.79
Now: Composite HID Lamp
Cost: $300 and up

Oddly enough, sealed-beam headlights were mandated in the 1940s to ensure that the reflectors didn't corrode and reduce lighting efficiency. Modern composite headlamps are generally much brighter and far less likely to be broken by a stone and usually integrate the turn signals. But they're very expensive to replace and can collect condensation and eventually haze over, requiring periodic polishing.

 

Read more: The Price of Modern Car Mechanics – Car Repair Price - Popular Mechanics 

 

The 20 fastest-growing U.S. imports from China 2010-2011

Source