My English Diet
I have eaten more packaged sandwiches since September than I had in the preceding 45 years.
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"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
By
gcallah
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I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
By
gcallah
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Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Great article Gene.
ReplyDelete"Things become resources when acting man conceives of how he can employ them to further his ends."
This is one of my favorite concepts. When I talk about resources with people I meet it is clear to me they totally miss most of my points because they have no idea this is where I am coming from. If I try to explain the above to them they seem to follow but only apply it the resource I use in the example...and even then they will go on to violate the concept we just agreed was 'true'. It never ends.
I enjoyed both those articles very much. One thing I'm not sure I understood: "I am using “profit” here in the accounting sense, meaning an excess of income over expenses, and not in the economic sense of an above-normal return on capital." In the economic sense, if prudent use of capital in some economic environment produces a return of 10%, does this mean that a return of 10% is profitless, and that a return of 15% shows a profit of 5%?
ReplyDeleteWhat's up with tinyurl.com, upon which you seemed to rely greatly? I've run into it somewhere else recently in connection with software.
How about that coffee that has to be shat through a lynx (or some sort of feline) and sells for $100 a pound? Let the Fair Traders set up a huge lynx farm and distribute the lynxes to the indigent coffee growers. Who said economics was hard?
Wabulon,
ReplyDeleteIn the economic sense, if prudent use of capital in some economic environment produces a return of 10%, does this mean that a return of 10% is profitless, and that a return of 15% shows a profit of 5%?
I think so, yes. Economic profits are returns above what you could otherwise get by investing capital in an equally risky venture.
Mischa: thanx.
ReplyDeleteIn re 'tinyurl': I looked it up. I understand now.
Erratum: for "Mischa" read "Micha."
ReplyDeleteYes, Micha is right -- setting aside the issue of risk, let's say you could invest in T-Bills at 4% per annum. Instead, you open a business the yields you 3%. You have suffered an (economic) loss of 1%.
ReplyDelete