AynCrap

The legacy of the most evil American robber baron of all is alive and well . Some fancy people at the Rockefeller Foundation must have missed the memo about evilly tweaking moustaches and rolling around in piles of money, because they're talking about preventing food waste. Rapacious swine.

Original here .

Who likes GapMinder ? If you don't, you probably don't like optimism itself for its optimismness. Well, too bad. I'm sick of talking to people who not only don't understand economics, statistics and logic but revel in their lack of understanding. You also wanna take a look at Data Is Beautiful for such delightful graphics as what the UK government could make from sales taxes if recreational narcotics were all legalised , a glorious one listing rhetological fallacies , and a graphic showing every death in the 20th Century along with its cause. There a lots more, too. You've got snake-oil charts, radiation dosage charts, musician revenue charts, and so on! Check it out with all haste!

Robert H Frank, writing for the New York Times, discusses how one of his students enquired into the fact that while Broadway Theatres charged more for shows the more popular they were, cinemas did no such thing. Indeed this is true. Why? The student in question had to put together a reasonable explanation and that explanation went something like this; Charging the same price as for less popular plays would make it impossible to accommodate everyone who wants to see a big hit. Far better would be to ration scarce seating by charging a premium price. With a popular movie, by contrast, additional copies can be made at minimal cost, and large audiences can be accommodated by showing it many times a day on multiple screens. By keeping prices low, theater owners can fill many more seats and generate far more revenue than they could by charging premium prices at a more limited number of screenings. You should read the whole piece as there are a few further examples. Or, contrary to t...

Here goes nothing... Humans consume to attain survival, safety, comfort and leisure. Distribution is the movement of goods or services through space or from one person to another, and occurs in five different ways, or modes, which are sharing, gift, theft, trade and planning. Production is the transformation of stuff by the application of labour and capital, and also comes in five modes; primitivism, agrarianism, corporatism, capitalism and command. Property is stuff claimed by a person or a group of persons as under their control or their exclusive control, and tends to be thought of in one of four ways; common, usufruct, state and private. ~~~ CONSUMPTION ~~~ Survival is the mere sustainment of one's existence; the continuation of organic function. Safety is the sense that one will survive, and/or keep what one values (family, friends, stuff) in the near and remote future. Comfort is a physical and emotional lack of material unease, say through having comfo...

BCL posted a list of papers to read to get better informed on a whole raft of eonomic subjects relating to the effects of government intervention, between them making the case pretty irresistibly in favour of freedom. Go check 'em out forthwith!

So not only should I review all three volumes of Capital by Marx , Price Theory by Friedman, and Modern Economic Growth by Acemoglu... now I must review Capitalism by George Reisman too... can I get this all done before the end of Summer? Ill bloody well try. Let's define the end of Summer as the end of August.

Logic is not my forte. So prepare for a load of posts in which Matt tries to get to grips with stuff rather than declaring war on people I disagree with. ~~~ I suppose there's no particular reason not to kick off with the laws of thought , those three sexy rules that define for all and sundry what are valid inferences and what are not. Despite their name they are not about though per se, but logic. We're safe on that front. Law of identity  :  F(x) ⊃ F(x) Law of non-contradiction  : ∼(p · ∼p) Law of excluded middle  :  p ∨ ∼p Britannica also mentions some exceptions re the excluded middle; The law of excluded middle and certain related laws have been rejected by L.E.J. Brouwer, a Dutch mathematical intuitionist, and his school, who do not admit their use in mathematical proofs in which all members of an infinite class are involved. Brouwer would not accept, for example, the disjunction that either there occur ten successive 7’s somewhere in the d...