Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Pete Boettke describes Lachmann's argument for methodological individualism here : "Austrian economists, Lachmann insisted, are methodological individualist because it is only at the level of the individual that we can attribute meaning to human action." Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that Lachmann is correct about the level of the individual and meaning. (I don't think he is, but I don't wish to argue that point here.) Does methodological individualism follow from the fact that "only at the level of the individual that we can attribute meaning to human action"? I can't see why it would. Why must all social explanations be related to the meaning of human actions? Schelling offers the following example that I believe shows they don't: Let us say human beings gain fine-tuned control over the height of their offspring, due to advances in genetic engineering. Most people are not that concerned with the height of their children, we w...

I have said this before: If someone, by some train of argument, seems to prove that the tree right in front of you is not really there, you do not necessarily need to become entangled in this fallacious, complicated argument: the best answer is often, "But there it is!" Eric Voegelin makes what I understand to be the same point here : "We should also note the change of meaning in the term Revelation: from the irruption of transcendental reality in religious experience and its expression in symbols (of which the meaning must be regained through faith concretely by every believer) into a body of propo­sitions of which the meaning is not to be recovered by faith but to be examined critically by Reason. "In brief: with this change we are in the jungle of enlightenment jargon in which discussion becomes impossible because the terms are no longer rooted in the concreteness of experience. "

And I want to both apologize and explain. Three points are relevant: 1) I have carpal tunnel syndrome. 2) At this point, I have 474 draft posts waiting to be put up at this blog. In other words, I have far more ideas than I am able to write up properly. 3) I often find myself with free time while sitting on a bus, train, or subway. Last week, my 30-mile ride to White Plains took me three hours on Metro-North. (Someone had committed suicide by jumping in front of a train ahead of mine.) Today, my five-mile bus ride to the White Plains train station took 50 minutes. (Holiday traffic.) The combination of the above three factors has been leading me to often try to use Siri to catch up on my posting. And Siri generates a whole lotta errors. I do my best to catch them, but if I am, say, on the bus, I am reviewing the post on a tiny cell phone screen while starting to feel motion sickness from looking at it. So, I am sorry. I have to up my efforts to catch these problems. But now y...

Dear home and garden answer man, Is the alcohol content of wine high enough that, if I forget I put a bottle in the freezer to "chill quickly," it will be just fine? Concerned in Brooklyn Dear Concerned in Brooklyn, No it isn't. Gene "Gotta get back to cleaning the sticky mess outta the freezer" Callahan

My understanding of methodological pluralism: on the table in front of us we have a globe, a street map of New York City, a subway map of New York City, a topographical map of New York City, and aerial photograph of New York City, hey zoning map of New York City, a 3-D model of New York City, and so on. Everyone in the room is arguing that the particular model they brought into the room is the "correct one" and should be used exclusively in order to understand New York City. What I say is that these are all just models, therefore abstract and incomplete, but all are fine as long as we remember that each is an incomplete abstraction. And anyone who is claiming their model is the only possible model doesn't really understand models. Of course, some models are rubbish: A "map" that shows Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn as neighborhoods on Staten Island might be a useful part of an alternate-universe story, but it is not useful for understan...

Mises talked about the connexity of prices , meaning that most or all markets in the world influence each other. Of course, that is "more or less influence each other." The corn market in the United States influences the pork market quite a bit, but the market for Tibetan religious ornaments much less so. But forces can act to increase the connexity of markets that were hitherto more loosely joined. For instance, the risk of mortgage-backed securities was seen as low, since they pooled mortgages from all over the country, and there had almost never been a nation-wide downturn in real estate prices: different area's real estate markets were only loosely connected. But, in the very act of pooling these mortgages, bankers were coupling these markets more tightly. So by dismissing the possibility of a nation-wide collapse in housing prices, the securitizers created conditions conducive to a nation-wide collapse in housing prices.

Is guaranteed by the above way of stating figures. I just saw it in a student paper, and I see it frequently in ads. "Prices lowered by up to 50% or more." Well, "up to 50%" states a ceiling: 50% is the most by which prices have been lowered. If there is some greater discount, then 50% is not the ceiling. Perhaps you meant "prices lowered by up to 55%"? Well, say that.