Plucked from this poignant post about externalities (which reminds me of my realization that limited liability corporations evolved from pirates) is this bit from a Rolling Stone article. It’s a nice clean example of cost benefit analysis in the “real world.” BP has also cut corners at the expense of its own workers. In 2005, 15 [...]
Paul Krugman is much amused by the realization that the origin of Pigouvian taxes(i.e. the idea that the temptation to dump your pollution into the community water supply might be tempered by a tax on such behavior) never actually mentions pollution but rather only mentions the problem where in one landowner’s enthusiasm for hunting causes a [...]
The library of congress has an wonderful collection of photographs taken at sardine packing plants. Thus I came to learn the word cartoner. Which was once a person, but is now a machine. Today comes news that the last such cannery in the US is shutting down, along with a few pictures. This all resonates [...]
“This Time is Different” is a fascinating book. It’s full of provocative confusing details. It does a wonderful job of helping to further the cause of making it clear economics has got a lot of work yet to do. There are lots of different large economic scale failure modes. Inflation, deflation, international debt default, intra-national debt default, etc. [...]
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 great deal [...]
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 [...]
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 I was [...]
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Oh man that is ugly, and as the column on the right shows household net worth is even worse.
Fresh Links…