Who Were the Sea Peoples?

There is a bakery near my house that specializes in bagels. Almost every day, they run out of sesame bagels before their other flavors. With this happening day after day, why don't they just make more sesame bagels? Of course, we could explain this simply by saying they keep repeating a mistake. And that is possibly the right explanation. But I wonder if we can explain what is happening within a model where this is a rational, profit maximizing firm? Any ideas?

My father recently told me that when he was young, and he would go shopping with his mother, she knew every single person she bought merchandise from. Today, he says, he hardly knows anyone he buys things from. Of course, taking a very limited amount of factors into our analysis, Walmart and other such giant chains are "more efficient" than the numerous mom-and-pop shops with which my grandmother dealt. But what is the effect on human well-being of moving from a society of interactions with friends and neighbors to one in which one deals largely with anonymous strangers? How will this play out over three or four generations? Obviously, no economist can answer those questions with enough certainty to be able to plug a number into some utility function and decide "Big chains are (not) beneficial." Economic analysis, to give us any clear answers, must carefully circumscribe what it includes. As such, the best it ever gives us is something to consider in our poli...

"Conditions which have become 'economic' have ceased to be material. They are motives, interests, means to ends." -- The Philosophical Theory of the State , p. 300 All of the idealist philosophers I have read recognized the "praxeological" nature of economic life.

it's maddening, isn't it? For instance : "Mr. Yergin denigrated those warning of future imbalance between oil supply and demand as having no credibility and reassured all that to the contrary..." Well, anyone who talks about an in balance between "supply and demand" should be denigrated, Because supply and demand our curves, or schedules, and by definition cannot be "imbalanced." Nor does shifting the talk to "quantity supplied" and "quantity demanded" save it from being bladder. Those quantities are never in balance excepted the equilibrium price, and whatever the supply and demand conditions, they are in balance at the equilibrium price. What the authors ought to have contended is that they see the price of oil rising in the future, but that does not sound as scary as an "oil supply crisis." And they would have a tough time making their case that international central planning of energy production is necessa...

In my yard in Pennsylvania, there is a sudden explosion of spiders that are bright orange, bright yellow, and black. I have never seen such creatures in my yard before this year. Why are they suddenly here? There are several possible answers, but among those I thought of was "Global warming: perhaps my yard was out of their range until just recently, but they have been moving north or up in elevation." And then I wondered just how spiders would know that they could move north? Were they getting weather reports? Little arachno-capitalist real estate agents were pitching them space between my fence railings? And then I realized the answer lies in marginalism: in whatever range the spiders can occupy, there must be some spiders who are just on the edge of making it: they are on marginal land, where they just scrape by. When they have their 247,000 babies or whatever enormous amount they have, those babies disperse and some of them wind up settling down between fence post...

Sometimes you see people claiming the above as a way of dismissing the entire economics profession. Now, I am no defender of economic imperialism in the social sciences. But I also think the claim questioned in the title of this post is seriously overblown. Consider the theory of optimal currency areas developed largely in the 1960s and 1970s. According to the tenets of this theory, as interpreted by many prominent economists, the Euro was a bad idea. According to an unpublished paper that I have just read, both Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman warned against the creation of the based on this theory. Many economists, apparently, predicted just the ways in which the Eurozone would break down. The politicians ignored these warnings and went ahead based on political considerations. And the economists turned out to be correct. So, although there are many contentious areas in economics, there really is some core agreement, backed up by empirical evidence.

First cut on a proposal for a co-edited volume: The contribution of idealist thinkers to political philosophy are well known and have been examined in depth. But when it comes to economics, the other parent of political economy, much less has been said. This is despite the fact that idealists have made important contributions to economic theory and its application, including Plato's analysis of the division of labour, Berkeley's economic thought, which Keynes considered the most advanced of its time, Hegel's analysis of commercial society, and Collingwood's, Croce's, and von Mises's similar analyses of economics as a "philosophical science." This volume attempts to begin filling that gap by collecting together commentaries on economic theory and economic issues from a number of prominent idealist thinkers, as well as contemporary authors. In addition, the general introduction, as well as the introductions to each essay, will seek to answer such qu...

"And, by the age of Mill and Marx indeed, even in Ricardo's time and Malthus's later editions -- the level of the subsistence wage rate was freed from physiological dimensions and became a dummy variable shot through with conventional standards of life hankered after by (some) workers. At this stage a meaningful false theory had been replaced by a meaningless nontheory that could never be vindicated or rejected by any pattern of historical facts." -- Paul Samuelson, "Modes of Thought in Economics and Biology," American Economics Review