A year or two ago I read just a tiny bit about honor cultures and came away quite dissatisfied. The dissatisfaction has been stewing in my head for quite a while. Most of the liturature about honor cultures is extremely dismissive or romantic. Here is a little model that I think goes a long way [...]
The Boston Globe has a story this morning about MIT students who have trouble graduating due to the University’s insistance on a swim test as part of their graduating requirements. Meanwhile this weekend I chatted with a woman who taught art history at MIT and reported that it was a regular occurance in her classes [...]
This just makes me sick. The report linked to below followed the money back to figure out who was funding the campaign to repeal the estate tax. …the families identified in this report and their companies’ political action committees have, since 1999, made at least $27.7 million in contributions to candidates and federally focused political [...]
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
I’d not seen this before. JWZ’s essay on RSI, or typing injury. “… it terrified me. … my career being over” I have one of my own written years and years ago. “… a friend who lost the ability to pick up a piece of paper …” And I see that Bill Clementson recently joined [...]
This table shows recent entries from the data reported here. Nation Gini Year Austria 23.7 2001 Sweden 25.7 2002 Netherlands 25.8 2001 Bosnia and Herzegovina 26.1 2001 Luxembourg 26.6 2001 Hungary 26.7 2002 Slovak Republic 26.7 2002 France 27.0 2002 Czech Republic 27.3 2002 Germany 28.0 2003 Albania 28.1 2002 Ireland 28.9 2001 Belgium 29.3 [...]
I’ve written quite a few posts about the wealth distribution over the years. It was one of the four things that forced my attention to power-law distributions and the processes behind them. (The others were: the PL distribution in the performance and modularity data of the software systems I studied; the PL distribution of the [...]
Very nice posting over over at Washington Monthly on income inequality trends under the two parties. The %20/80 cut point he uses isn’t a very good metric, I think it under estimates the severity of the skew since much of the wealth captured is up in the 1%, 5% region; but it will do.
Since I’d recently been browsing various explanations of the Labor Theory of Value the meaning of this illustration seemed obvious. Labor is combined with capital’s assets to create value; but I am informed that the illustration is actually intended to render a saying. “There is always a way to a rich man’s money.” Which is [...]
I recalled that the nation’s forefathers flirted with the idea of repudiating the revolutionary war debt. That reminding is care of the recent spectacle of our president flirting with the a similar idea. The US debt is 7.7 Trillion, which I gather we borrowed from the rest of the planet. The world population is 6.37 [...]
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
One of the ways to get a El Curve is to take a population and iteratively reward the winners slightly in each round. This appears to be the model that gives rise to power law distributions in things like oil reserves. So I’m always interested in research that looks at the details of the iterative [...]
Fresh Links…