Physics Phun

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Physics without PDE's.

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Capitalism

I'm still gagging on the punch line to Tyler Cowen's love letter to Ayn Rand : The true take-away message is a reaffirmation of how the enormous productive powers of capitalism -- the greatest force for human good ever achieved -- rely on the driving human desire to be excellent. Now it happens that I think that capitalism (or at any rate, a mixed economy with a significant dose of capitalism) is the best economic system for an industrial economy. It did manage to keep chugging on when various variations on socialism ran aground in the twentieth century. How, though, can a not always idiotic guy like Cowen come up with such preposterous load of crap? I think I understand the logic. Capitalism has been the dominant economic system for the past two hundred years. Those two hundred years have seen a vast burst of technological progress and improvement of the standard of living for a large fraction of the people. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is the usual name of this logical fa...
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Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec...
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The Poverty Paradox: Review

By Mark Robert Rank The titular paradox is poverty in the USA, the largest and one of the richest countries in the world.   Compared to other rich countries the USA has much more and worse poverty than almost any other.   Professor Rank dissects the causes and has some suggestions, few if any of which would fly with the modern Republican Party. Rank proposes what he calls the structural vulnerability hypothesis.   That means that political policies and economic circumstances punish the poor and make it harder to escape poverty.   Bad schools and bad neighborhoods promote poverty and make it hard to escape.   The US ranks high on the inequality scale and low on the social mobility scale. Rank argues that a major driver of poverty in the US is blame the victim thinking, the idea that if persons are poor, it is their own fault.   Much poverty can be traced to lack of social capital: education, other saleable skills, disability, poor health, or access to ...
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