Wednesday, March 10, 2010
I’m still chewing on the idea of guard labor, so a pile of random thoughts I’ve been having.
Businesses adapt the ratio between guard labor v.s. productive labor. That ratio varies across firms within industries, from one industry to another, and inside of firms from on department to another. Presumably there is a [...]
I’m reading, savoring actually, a fascinating essay on “guard labor” i.e. people paid to enforce the rules upon others. The TSA, those guys at the front desk of office buildings that check ID cards, the mall cops, the supervisors who’s only role is to be sure everybody keeps their nose to the grind stone, etc. etc. [...]
Brad DeLong posted this chart. I’ll assume I understand this.
These lines show your annual return on a stock portfolio. The pink line is the return on a portfolio held for a decade, and the blue is the return for two decades. The pink line ends in 2000, if you had invested then and cashed 10 [...]
Colbert is brilliant:
The Colbert Report
Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word – Honor Bound
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor
Economy
… via Calculated Risk: Colbert: Honor Bound.
Sometime ago I posted about a fun book on depression era “stamp scrip” a variant of local currency that, to hear tell, actually works. In that posting I quoted a story about the surprising amusing helpful role that a high velocity currency can play. Today I happened upon the same story again, but [...]
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Oh man that is ugly, and as the column on the right shows household net worth is even worse.
Some nice illustration of income inequality pulled together at Visualizing Economics. For example this shows a fine grain map of US income inequality. Oh I’d love to see a video of that over time!
Or this scatter plot nations showing the height of inequality v.s. their per-capital GDP. The US, an outlier, is highlighted.
Lots [...]
I’ve not read this paper yet, but I’ve thought about the issues it raises a lot since the very beginning of the housing bubble’s collapse. To summarize the summary this paper is about the different ethical frames around mortgage holders v.s. mortgage lenders. The lender is expected to act in a purely rational [...]
I have recently started reading Albert Hirschman’s 1991 book “The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.” I’m only 20 pages into it so no telling where it’s going. But so far, it has totally blown me away. The book is an outline of three styles of rhetoric that are commonly used by [...]
Thursday, October 15, 2009
I enjoyed this video (ht Brad) of Professor R.C. Allen outline the theory he presents in his recent book. The question at hand is what triggered the Industrial Revolution. Why Britian and associated questions. To hear him tell it the existing theory seems to be that they finally stumbled into the right institutional frameworks; reasonably [...]
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