Most Light Rail Projects Are Costly and Inefficient
09 May 2020 Leave a comment
in politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, transport economics, urban economics Tags: benefit cost analysis, trains
Economics in One Lesson – Henry Hazlitt
09 May 2020 Leave a comment
(These notes are just the tip of the iceberg. “Economics in One Lesson” is one of the most brilliant, yet approachable, books on economics ever written, and you can download it in PDF format for free HERE.
Note: All notes below are direct quotations from the book unless surrounded by parentheses.)
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The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. (5)
[The argument that war helps the economy] confuses need with demand. The more war destroys, the more it impoverishes, the greater is the postwar need. Indubitably. But need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires…
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Fooled by Randomness – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
09 May 2020 Leave a comment
At least in terms of Expected Value it is far better to be a dentist than a rock star, because dentists earn consistently large salaries while the majority of rock stars earn very little, and even those that do become successful and make millions don’t swing the profession’s average salary to the level of dentists.
And if lack of variance is valuable to you, than being a dentist becomes even more attractive!
Statistical example of the lack of variance in the long-term relative to the short-term: “A 15% return with 10% volatility (or certainty) per annum translates into a 93% probability of success in any given year. But seen at a narrow time scale, this translates into a mere 50.02% probability of success over any given second” (65)
“(T)here are Monte Carlo generators designed to structure such texts and write entire papers. Fed with ‘postmodernist’ texts, they can randomize phrases…
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#COVID19: Is the government really ‘following the science’? – BBC Newsnight
08 May 2020 Leave a comment
in econometerics, health economics Tags: economics of pandemics
Norden Bombsight
08 May 2020 Leave a comment
“It is not very difficult to hit a target from an altitude of 30,000 feet.”
Theodore H. Barth, Norden Bombsight Co.
Great advances are seldom the products of a single mind; rather they arise from lore and facts previously known. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch draper in the seventeenth century was working in his father’s shop when he wanted a better way of seeing the quality of threads they were using than the then current magnifying lenses. His curiosity led to one of the most significant and technical developments in the history of science: the microscope with its magic enlargements. Countless scientists have profited by van Leeuwenhoek’s curiosity and subsequent knowledge.
Two hundred years after Leeuwenhoek, Joseph Lister, a professor of surgery at Glasgow University, learned more about the French chemist Louis Pasteur’s experiments which showed that fermentation and food spoilage could occur under anaerobic conditions if micro-organisms were present…
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Reality check for renewable energy
08 May 2020 Leave a comment
in energy economics, environmental economics, global warming Tags: solar power, wind power
Maori real incomes up 83% since 1992
08 May 2020 Leave a comment
in economic history, politics - New Zealand, poverty and inequality
Source: Ministry of Social Development at https://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/monitoring/household-incomes/household-incomes-1982-to-2018.html
Sex-differences in the effect of cardiovascular drugs
08 May 2020 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, health economics, law and economics Tags: sex discrimination
Whatever happened to the population bomb?
08 May 2020 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, population economics
#COVID19
08 May 2020 Leave a comment
in health economics, labour economics, labour supply, politics - Australia, unemployment Tags: economics of pandemics
@AOC @BernieSanders @SenWarren @Greens @NZGreens @GreenpeaceAP
08 May 2020 Leave a comment
in economics of bureaucracy, economics of education, economics of information, Public Choice Tags: cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, moral psychology, pessimism bias, political correctness, political psychology, regressive left
Creative destruction
08 May 2020 Leave a comment
in economic history, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation Tags: The Great Enrichment
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