CapitalistImperialistPig

So what does a libertarian say to his kid who claims that an Eight O'clock bedtime is slavery? A certain brand of Libertarian Wack equates any government whatsoever with slavery, on the grounds that it impinges on their right to do anything they want. These people don't understand the phrase reductio ad absurdum.

I wanted to put together a post on entropy, but I can't seem to get my thoughts organized.

I should really give up economist bashing. Economists themselves are so much better at it . Robert Waldmann writes: Zombie Economics: Just from the first two words of the title "Zombie Economics:" I assumed the book was about reanimation of refuted hypotheses. I'd say the point is not that economists have come up with a lot of false hypotheses. That's normal and just the way hypotheses are. The point is that the status of those so-called hypotheses is not reduced by empirical evidence. As noted by Quiggin, one problem is that they aren't hypotheses at all but rather statements so vague that they can't be tested. The other problem is that many economists draw policy implications of statements so vague that they can't be tested.

If Wall Street and Math interest you, don't miss Peter Woit's review of The Quants . Some parts that I like: Patterson’s story emphasizes heavily the relationship to gambling. He writes extensively about Ed Thorp, who developed the theory of card-counting, did well with this at casinos, then moved on to the hedge fund business. Just about everyone profiled in Patterson’s book is described as having read and been inspired by Thorp’s 1962 book on card-counting (Beat the Dealer). ... ...The book has little to say about a more significant failure that involved a different group of quants, those responsible for the bad mathematical models used to justify the mortage securitization business. From what I can tell, there the story is that if there’s a lot of money to be made creating a financial instrument carrying large risks obscured by complexity, it’s not hard to find people willing to help you sell it by creating bad mathematical models of its behavior. I would like to see Wolfga...

1280 CE is not one of those years that jumps out of the history books at you, but eyeglasses seem to have been invented about then. Robert the Bruce was six years old,Thomas Aquinas was six years dead, and Marco Polo was in China at the court of Kublai Khan. Meanwhile, away from the center of the World, Native Americans were occupying the Gila Cliff dwellings in what is now New Mexico and Polynesian sailors were arriving in New Zealand, where they colonized it, killed off the megafauna, and became the very warlike Maori. A couple of hundred years later, about the same time that Columbus was sailing the Ocean blue, some of their descendants colonized the Chatham islands, became the Moriori and developed a rigorously non-violent and pacifistic society. Unfortunately, these Moriori traits did not serve them well when their Maori cousins arrived in 1835 and proceeded to exterminate their culture and all but a tiny number of them. We humans clearly have the capability of either warlik...

One of the interesting points of the previous topic is the question of what exactly is "socially useful." The answer depends on what you mean by "socially" and "useful." China reputedly spent tens of billions on the Beijing Olympics. Why? It spent all that because it wanted to signal to it's own people and the world that it had become a great power. Most major nations now invest quite a lot in their Olympic programs with the objective of increasing their prestige. They do this because they realize that they are in competition with each other and that prestige matters in that competition. Do a few olympic medals make it more likely that other nations will buy your products or decide not to try a miltary adventure against you? Probably so, and even if they don't, they appeal to our primitive instincts that equate prestigious with "dangerous." Humans tend tend to organize themselves into a heterarchy of social units, which both compe...

Is Steve Landsburg a closeted social democrat? I would never have guessed, but how about this statement? ...No, you’ve missed the main point, which is that markets work well when the reward to a supplier is commensurate with the social value of what he produces, and that tournaments (such as Olympic events) are classic examples of markets where that condition is not met. Now this sounds to me like something Paul Krugman might have said, but Prof Landsburg said it right here . What, you might say? You're quoting Landsburg again! What is your problem? I not a big fan of Landsburg's opinions, and he can't stand me, but he does turn out to have a lot of the ideas that are just annoying enough to get my attention. Ideas can be annoying because they are wrong, trite, insulting, or just boring. Such are the mosquitoes of the idea world. There is a more interesting type of annoying idea though, and that’s the one that undermines some tenet (or even tenant!) of one’s world view...