Weblog
09 Aug 2010 at 09:11
Peter Risdon
Blank slate, Free market, Just interesting, Politics, economics, evolution
Cut through some of the fluff that surrounds this 20 minute talk, and the core is completely fascinating.
Laurie Santos has been experimenting with “monkeynomics”. She has taught a group of monkeys to use money – metal discs – to pay for treats then after straightforward “purchases” of treats, one grape for one disc, become routine [...]
Tim says, of speculation in foodstuffs:
Imagine we had no speculation at all? Not even physical hoarding.
You don’t have to imagine. As I pointed out in a post a year ago, this was exactly the situation during much of the Middle Ages, when regrating was at times illegal and always condemned by the Church. Regrating means:
To [...]
No, according to the measured conclusion of this paper by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi and Francesco Trebbi:
Moreover, given the nature of political influence and the complexity of government decisions, our results should not be seen as a “smoking gun”. Instead we provide suggestive evidence of the influence of subprime borrowers and lenders [...]
I have been trying to digest this Krugman article in the NY Times about the Tea Party movement. Sooper genius Krugman has worked it out: the Tea Partiers think the GOP is about helping people, but it’s really about helping corporations.
“The mood on the right may be populist, but it’s a kind [...]
Does regulation improve worker safety? If so, you should be able to tell from this graph when the USA’s landmark Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed. Can you? Scroll down for the answer.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Via.
Theodore Dalrymple:
When the crowd tried to storm the Greek parliament, shouting, “Thieves! Thieves!,” its anger was misdirected. It was a classic case of what Freudians call projection: the attribution to others of one’s own faults. It is true that the Greek politicians are much to blame for the current situation, and [...]
The Irish Liberty Forum has moved to: http://irishlibertyforum.org/
I recommend the site strongly. Libertarianism gets associated with ZaNuLieBore crapola far too often and the Irish Libs are serious and thoughtful explorers of this seam of political thought.
(See also the Oxford Libertarian Society for serious libertarian thinking, often in the form of video lectures by visiting academics).
After the abolition of fractional reserve banking, one of the things some libertarians (and others) tend to advocate is a return to the gold standard. The idea seems to be twofold: that this would remove from governments or central banks (which amounts to much the same thing) the ability to vary the amount of currency [...]
Staying with this subject, about thirty years ago I spent an afternoon chatting with the man who started the Pitlochry Knitwear Company. He had initially used a very conservative bank that wouldn’t lend; they saw their role more as that of deposit takers. So he moved to a different bank, much to the stunned irritation [...]
When I posted before on this subject, I wrote:
While [fractional reserve banking] might be inflationary, it also fuels growth. The alternative, so far as I can see, would be both deflationary and cause economic contraction.
Adam Smith lived throught he period when this system first became widespread in Scotland. Here’s what he had to say about [...]