AynCrap

Deirdre McCloskey is currently my favorite economist. McCloskey sums up the message of the first few chapters of her book Bourgeois Equality - our lives have been transformed for the better by modern economic growth; Going in to some depth about why that explosive economic growth actually happened; Interviewed by Dave Rubin; A fancy debate; Another fancy debate, this time for IQ Squared;

The labor theory theory employed by many anti-capitalists generally hinges on the Marxian unit of account called socially necessary abstract labor time - where abstract means average - because fuck Capital Volume Three's even worse quagmire of prices of production. This is fun and short; The following video deals with the Marxist rebuttal to the, admittedly half-baked, mud pie criticism. He points out here that it is only after a good is sold that one can begin looking back through time to try to figure out how many labor-points went in to it; This one's more lighthearted. Two t-shirts employ the same SNALT as each other but seel for different prices. One features Che Guevara, the other Milton Friedman. Different strokes - and therefore different prices - for different folks; Aaaaaand a more technical exposition of marginalism;

In 1960 a paper by Ronald Coase was published called The Problem of Social Cost, in which Coase deals head on with the problem of externalities by examining three broad categories of responses to such potential problems; taxation, regulation & property. Lear Liberty knocked up a nice short video summing up the three solutions and using the concept of social costs (nowadays called transaction costs) to explain how best to control the production of externalities from the actions of economic agents. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution University have their own video on the same subject, considerably more detailed. I heartily recommend both videos,  preferably in the order above, to begin one's initiation into the mystery of the Coase Theorem!

Oh Lord, grant me nose plugs mightier than Adamintine, for the Anarchist FAQers have been at their mischief again. Like Iain McKay's reply to Bryan Caplan's long essay The Anarcho-Statists of Spain there is a big problem with the dispute. Basically the attackers make a big deal out of things that either don't affect Friedman's case, or that only affect it slightly. ~~~ COMMUNAL ~~~ For some reason the existence of local governments called hreppar (hreppr singular) is the main historical item used to dispute Friedman's claim that Saga Iceland played host to polycentric law and private property. Yes I uttered that sentence and yes I'm accurately summing up these guys' argument. In other words they don't bother dealing with the actual meat of Friedman's argument, which is that there was no centralised executive to bring cases to trial. All cases were brought privately. The laws of the land allowed for a set number of godord or arbitr...

Tesla has for some time offered its customers free lifetime recharges at Tesla charging stations. Anyone wanna guess the result?  Turns out charging no money for the use of a scarce resource leads to shortages/excessive demand. Le gasp! In this case it means long queues of Model S and X Teslas lining up for juice, like a luxury breadline.

As all three of you know Iain McKay , librarian of the workers' revolution and keeper of the one truth , is my favourite person ever. Several of his pieces are published on libcom.org so I couldn't help but browse. This will be a series with this top bit repeated through each post. Sorry for that. I'm unresponsive to my public :p ~~~ In a piece called The Grand Bluff: Private profits, social risks our truth-teller gives a quick history of limited liability and why it's a bad thing; namely that it decreases owners' exposure to the risks the businesses they own take on. Correct! Limited liability is one state-granted monopoly privilege (along with organisational legal personhood, patents, and copyrights) that pretty much all anti-statists oppose. By describing the situation from the perspective of risk McKay even gets the reason why it's economically problematic right. Inevitably, however, there are some things I must complain about; there wouldn'...

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...