Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
15 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Amnesty International, Hamas, human shields, Israel, laws of war, temporary doves, war crimes
The clip shows the small missile that strikes a building as a warning to get out.
This “knock on the roof” technique has been condemned by Amnesty International’s Philip Luther:
“There is no way that firing a missile at a civilian home can constitute an effective ‘warning’. Amnesty International has documented cases of civilians killed or injured by such missiles in previous Israeli military operations on the Gaza Strip,” said Philip Luther.
15 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of climate change, environmental economics, environmentalism, global warming Tags: an inconvenient truth, global warming
HT: aei-ideas.org
15 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory Tags: moral hazard
I’ve had arguments with people until I’m blue in the face trying to persuade them that the risk of accidents is influenced by incentives.
15 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in economics
If a handful of time-travelling activists from our own era were somehow transported into a leftist political meeting in 1970, would they even be able to make themselves understood? They might begin to talk, as present-day activists do, about challenging privilege, the importance of allyship, or the need for intersectional analysis. Or they might insist that the meeting itself should be treated as a safe space. But how would the other people at the meeting react? I’m quite sure that our displaced contemporaries would be met with uncomprehending stares.
It’s not so much that the words they use would be unfamiliar. Certainly ‘privilege’ is not a new word, for instance. But these newcomers to the 1970 Left would have a way of talking about politics and political action that would seem strange and off-kilter to the others at the meeting. If one of the time travellers told others at…
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15 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
14 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Gaza Strip, Hamas, war crimes
see the Google map at http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/google_map_palestine.htm which shows that much of Gaza Strip to be rural – ideal for Hamas military and missile bases away from civilians as required by the laws of war.The laws of war also call for uniforms and the carrying of weapons openly so the fact that compliance with these laws of law would make Hamas more exposed to air attack is beside the point.
14 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in Austrian economics, macroeconomics Tags: Austrian business cycle theory, Murray Rothbard, rational expectations
I find it surprising that so many concentrate on rational expectations when discussing Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). Is Austrian business cycle theory the only modern business cycle theory that must reach such a high bar?
Many modern business cycle theories build on information costs and learning and explain that people make forecasting errors because of noisy information, and repeated monetary shocks keeping up this confusion.
A good general explanation of misperceptions theories of business cycle is in Alchian and Allen (1967), which Murray Rothbard called a brilliant textbook. The business cycle is not based on money illusion or on systematic mistakes.
People take time to acquire the necessary information to interpret what has shocked the economy and what these changes mean for them. Additional shocks complicate this learning so there are more errors and confusion continues to affect market choices. Learning is neither instantaneous nor is the requisite information free to collate. People must make do with the incomplete knowledge they have and make choices about market signals that might be spurious or be meaningful signs of change.
Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard all noted in the collection edited by Garrison, for example, that a one-shot monetary shock would be soon uncovered by entrepreneurs, the malinvestments quickly reversed, and the boom would bust. Monetary shock after monetary shock require repeated entrepreneurial revisions and it will take a long time for entrepreneurs to catch up. This is also in Alchian and Allen.
Rothbard (MES pp. 1002-1005) discusses one-time versus repeated and increasingly large in size monetary shocks as the basis for booms and the reasons for the on-going deception of entrepreneurs. The shocks must increase in size to keep injecting more unanticipated noise into monetary and entrepreneurial calculations.
ABCT proposes a more complicated signal extraction problem than in say the Lucas-Phelps islands model. Dispersed and slowly unfolding information must be produced as each new monetary shock ripples its own unique way across the economy, passing through different hands each time. Only slowly does the requisite knowledge about the relative prices effects of each new monetary shock emerge as the result of market interactions and become open to entrepreneurial discovery.
What is perhaps dismissed too easily by Rothbard (but not Mises) is that under a gold standard, increases in the output of gold mining can be well forecasted by entrepreneurs. Rothbard’s best ground is when he notes that "the credit expansion tampered with all their [entrepreneurs’] moorings." A stop-go monetary policy is by definition unpredictable. Gold output fluctuations are irregular but usually small. A unique contribution of ABCT is that the longer the boom, the deeper the bust.
14 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in income redistribution, politics - New Zealand Tags: The Great Enrichment
the increases were 55% for Pakeha, 57% for Pasifika, and 64% for Māori since 1994.
14 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, survivor principle Tags: creative destruction, media bias, Schumpeter, television networks
14 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in administration, liberalism Tags: blogging
700th post, 36,600+ views, 49 much appreciated followers and 66 comments. My best single day had 4,772 views.
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