Who Were the Sea Peoples?

In the midst of my macro class today, I came up with two ideal types to help the class picture one economy in which Say's Law holds, and one in which it does not. Let's look at each. First we imagine a class dance party. We stipulate that people are only allowed to enter the dance hall in pairs, and that they agree to dance with any available partner at any point they are in the hall, and then they all leave at the same time. In that situation, no general glut is possible. Every person by entering the room is simultaneously supplying and demanding a dance partner, surely the proper way to understand Keynes's formulation of Say's Law as "supply creates its own demand." So long as there is an even number of people in the room, no one can overproduce a supply of dance partners. Say's Law holds. The dance was such a success that we plan a class picnic. Everyone is going to make a small dish, the right size for a single meal, with the idea that everyone ...

Joseph Fetz posts an interesting video on a day without a traffic light versus one with the light at a fairly busy intersection. It certainly gives one things to think about. But if you click through to YouTube, you find people making ludicrous claims about what the video "proves": no regulations are necessary and so on. Here is the actual question the video raises: when do we need explicit signalling mechanisms to coordinate our actions, and when can we get by without them? It has nothing at all to do with state versus non-state solutions: Plenty of private entities create plenty of explicit signalling mechanisms: factories have bells to start and end work, private parking lots erect stop signs and create one-way lanes, drummers count bands into a song, coaches call out set plays in basketball, the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. Sometimes these are a good idea, sometimes not: For instance, I have seen it suggested that basketball coaches are far too anxious to r...