Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"To say that the market economy belongs to a basically bourgeois total order implies that it presupposes a society which is the opposite of proletarianized society, in the wide and pregnant sense which it is my continual endeavor to explain, and also the opposite of mass society as discussed in the preceding chapter. Independence, ownership, individual reserves, saving, the sense of responsibility, rational planning of one's own life -- all that is alien, if not repulsive, to proletarianized mass society." -- Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy , p. 99

Here , including a contribution by yours truly.

A very good analysis from David Frum, here . I'd add that it's not so much his particular policies, as the fact he ticks off the "right" people.

I am working on learning how to do linear programming in Excel; I would like to do this for my production possibility frontier model. Is there anyone out there who wouldn't mind mentoring me a little on this?

In Excel, posted to GitHub . Right now I have: A real growth vs. nominal growth vs. inflation spreadsheet A Keynesian Cross spreadsheet; and A Production Possibility Frontier spreadsheet. All of them are built on a minimal data entry paradigm; for instance, for the Keynesian Cross, you only need enter autonomous consumption, marginal propensity to consume, and intended investment, and the whole kit and caboodle recalculates from there. For the PPF, you just enter a maximum number of units, and everything recalculates: great for showing a collapsing or expanding PPF.

They are abstractions that highlight an aspect of the thing being modeled. That is why I deny that, by making a model of a recession in which "recessions are not about output and employment and saving and investment and borrowing and lending and interest rates and time and uncertainty... the only essential things are a decline in monetary exchange caused by an excess demand for the medium of exchange," Nick Rowe has shown that in real recessions, those are the only essential things. For instance, what about the proposition that "The Ptolemaic model of the solar system proves that it is not about rock-and-ice-and-gas planets orbiting a giant plasma orb: The only essential thing is pure circular movement"? But perhaps the problem there is that that is not a good model. So let's say we get a better one: Newton's. Now we have a planet as a point mass, orbiting the Sun, another point mass. Is this the "essence" of the solar system? That d...

I encountered an article recently -- I am not going to bother even looking it up and linking to it, because similar sentiments are a dime a dozen -- arguing that the American way of using a fork while eating is "inefficient," and thus should be replaced by a more European style. But... what does "efficiency" have to do with table manners? If our goal, when sitting down at the table, was to simply get food as "efficiently" as possible into our mouths, we would just plunge our face down into our dish, the same way our dogs eat. Civilized eating is precisely about checking our tendency to eat like an animal, and constraining our appetite according to cultural rules as to how we may eat. To evaluate our table manners based on whether the American way of eating with a fork is more or less "efficient" than eating with chopsticks, or one's fingers, is to completely misconstrue what table manners are about: they exist to reduce our "effi...