snrplfth

29 ms·

211.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Rants about degeneracy get bigger audiences I guess.
212.
by snrplfth 10y ago
> Land is only valuable due to scarcity. You really can't make more of it even if you dig up parts of another bit of land to dump into a bay (like how they made the airport in Tokyo). Well, the majority of the land extensions in Tok
213.
by snrplfth 10y ago
> If you actually look at paper after paper the core data is horrible or there are simple lapses in judgement about how their research is structured. You sit in graduate class criticizing and laughing at some of this but that's the
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Well, I was kind of joking. People who call it "regulatory capture" of course understand the concept. To most people it's counterintuitive and barely grasped.
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Yeah, I wish he would just stop calling his blog "the Antiplanner" if he's not going to actually, you know, oppose planning. Ah well.
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Or, heck, they don't think about the published excuse at all. That's the real knotty problem - most people don't really have the time or information or inclination to care, so regulatory capture just keeps ratcheting up becau
217.
by snrplfth 10y ago
If only Randal O'Toole were actually a libertarian. He claims to dislike the government, but he pretty much loves government urban planning. Not sure why he's at Cato. (For more political diversity, I guess?) Also he calls himself
218.
by snrplfth 10y ago
"Regulatory capture is a common ..." True! "...and well understood phenomenon." Oh, if only it were so.
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by snrplfth 10y ago
> The road analogy is specifically dealing with the idea that land itself can be an exclusive good and thus individuals who naturally exclude others (someone's home, factory, farm, etc are the property on the land but not the land i
220.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Exactly. See also: "trade deficit/surplus" and "value". Economists use all sorts of jargon that really does not convey to the layman what it actually means.
221.
by snrplfth 10y ago
> "the US have grown to a country based on consumption, spending and borrowing, but not on producing anything." Eh, not really. Services and other tertiary industries are just as much "production" as a factory or a mi
222.
by snrplfth 10y ago
It's not necessarily always easy or painless. I certainly didn't claim it was. But you can't really grow the economy without introducing labour-saving devices that change the composition of jobs. Economies didn't have 90
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by snrplfth 10y ago
> Therefore, I ask why do you feel it's logical to continue down the path of further monopolizations which inevitably harm the economy as a whole and individuals in their pursuit of material betterment? Why do you assume I'm in
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by snrplfth 10y ago
But capital is dynamic and ever-changing. Also, a huge amount of it, quite possibly a majority in how you measure it, is in human skills and knowledge. Capital is not a pool of objects that, once made, forever provide a return. All machines
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Generally we don't, and really can't, know ahead of time which new work will be invented and done in the future. That is the point of entrepreneurialism, and of a market more broadly. What I'm pointing out is that it has cons
226.
by snrplfth 10y ago
That's been the "theory" for a long time - say, the threshing machine will mean that farmers will be unemployed, the powered sawmill will put all the sawyers out of work, the spreadsheet program will put all the accountants o
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by snrplfth 10y ago
But a lot of what that technology does is reduce the energy cost of doing any particular thing - so naturally, we do more of it because it's cheaper, but for the same energy input we're getting much more. When calculations had to
228.
by snrplfth 10y ago
Well, I take issue with the "know it when you see it" characteristic of the piece. Eco accuses fascists, rightly I think, of making no clear distinctions, of thinking in impressions. That's why I'm annoyed that he seems
229.
by snrplfth 10y ago
I've read it, thanks. I read it a decade ago and a few times since, back when I was in a semiotics degree program and Eco was a prominently featured thinker. I respect him, but I don't really agree with him on this one. Sure, he&#
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by snrplfth 10y ago
“These features cannot be organised into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” Umb
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by snrplfth 10y ago
It's also why so many CEOs get fired with "golden parachutes" - the value of getting rid of them quickly vastly exceeds the amount of money they get as severance.
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by snrplfth 10y ago
What's notable is that Northern European economies have among the freest, most "market capitalist" economies on Earth. There's a substantial amount of tax-and-redistribute to them, but very little in the way of economic
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Essentially zero actual economists assert or believe that actual humans in actual economies are, or behave like, homo economicus. Essentially all are aware that it is a limited model, which attempts to approach certain important features of
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by snrplfth 10y ago
These examples don't actually disprove anything about microeconomics though. Your example of the fish markets is just a good example of the fact that people have varying marginal utilities of money. Of course people try to get the high
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Here's a few examples: - High implicit labour prices. When you add up all the required costs to hire somebody (minimum wage, healthcare costs, payroll taxes, etc.) it's no surprise that there's going to be some portion of the
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by snrplfth 10y ago
They've been working on this concept for several years at their Washington state offices. It's just now that we're seeing hard details.
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by snrplfth 10y ago
Surge pricing, how does it work.
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by snrplfth 10y ago
I think maybe it has to do with what people are asked about, and with the level of uncertainty. Most questions that people would ask of a CS degree holder are probably specific technical ones, with fairly well-defined answers. But with econ
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by snrplfth 10y ago
The "rational actor" is just a model, only applicable to limited situations, and acknowledged to be so. It's a specifiable model against which to test hypothoses. This rather shopworn critique - "humans aren't like
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by snrplfth 10y ago
The disagreement is not whether Laffer curves exist, in a basic sense - nobody disagrees that there is some kind of revenue curve (and it changes over time in response to various factors.) However: the Laffer curve does not necessarily say

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