A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists–even Wall Street quants–have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li’s work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut–determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related–and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

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I’m not sure why the micropayments-as-the-savior-of-journalism meme seems to have taken off of late, but I’m glad there are lots of people trying to squash it: I’d particularly recommend Gabe Sherman and Clay Shirky. But in the case of Steve Brill’s “secret memo” on the subject, it’s worth responding to some of his specifics; a few points are worth making beyond those of David Cay Johnston.

First, Brill frames the question in an utterly bizarre manner, through the parent of a journalism student:

As one parent put it to me last fall, “Why are you luring my daughter into something that will never pay her loans when she could go to work for McKinsey?” I have been trying to construct an answer for her.

The answer is simple: “Madam, if your daughter wants to go work for McKinsey, she’s more than welcome to.” You want to make lots of money? Don’t become a journalist. In fact, if you’re the kind of person who would make a great management consultant, don’t become a journalist: The skillsets are just too different.

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Wednesday, over a very tasty seafood lunch, I watched Felix Salmon spend two hours trying to convince FT.com (PSO) managing director Rob Grimshaw to abandon his newspaper’s attempts to get its readers to pay for online content. He did not succeed.

Currently, FT.com has a hybrid model whereby readers are able to view a set number of articles for free each month but required to register and then to subscribe if they wish to exceed that ration. Felix hates this model because he believes it gets the incentives all wrong: Any reader who understands the model and doesn’t wish to subscribe will be careful only to click on stories that he absolutely must read, thus depriving FT of page views and ad revenue. And he has a point. While it allows FT to wring out some revenue from an area that yields many newspapers none at all, it’s still a bothersome kludge that encourages readers (and bloggers, a.k.a. readers’ sherpas) to frequent the sites of FT’s competitors.

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Jordan Golson can’t be happy: Nick Denton has cut the amount of money he gets per thousand page views to $6.50 from $9.75. That’s a 33% pay cut, on a per-page-view basis. What about on an absolute basis?

Well, the page-view rate is set on the basis of the previous quarter’s page views. Total Q4 page views were 9,132,723, while Q1 page views rose 34% to 12,234,604 . The 33% cut matches the 34% rise in page views, right? Er, no.

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