"Wise and discipled men refuse to indulge in immediate pleasures when the indulgence seems only too likely to lead in the long run to an overbalance of misery or pain."

— Henry Hazlitt

Tags: Quotes Hazlitt

"Incidentally, I find it strange to recall that my education was utterly dominated by two stories: the Bible’s and Rome’s. Both were disappointing examples of history. One told the story of an obscure, violent and somewhat bigoted tribe and one of its later cults, who sat around gazing at their theological navels for a few thousand years while their fascinating neighbours—the Phoenicians, Philistines, Canaanites, Lydians and Greeks—invented respectively maritime trade, iron, the alphabet, coins and geometry. The other told the story of a barbarically violent people who founded one of the empires that institutionalised the plundering of its commercially minded neighbours, then went on to invent practically nothing in half a millennium and achieve an actual diminution in living standards for its citizens, very nearly extinguishing literacy as it died. I exaggerate, but there are more interesting figures in history than Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar."

— Matt Ridley

"The answer to constraining rent-seeking expendtures is to constrain the ability of government to create rents."

— Allen Dalton

Typical Exchange

  • Me: Could you possibly iron my shirt? It takes me a lot longer than you and I need to shower.
  • Dad: Could you possibly do the dishes? It took me a lot longer than it would take you if you did some.
  • Me: I'll try to remember. But my shirt needs to be ironed now. I'm hopping in the shower.

Rent Seeking

  • Brain: We must prepare for tomorrow night.
  • Pinky: What are we doing tomorrow night?
  • Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky—seeking out some rent!
"In scholarship it is not perhaps necessity, but prejudice, that is the mother of invention."

— Mancur Olson

Be Wary

The invisible hand will smite you.

"Then I ask you, I plead with you, I beg you all, walk out of here [the Fed] with me, never to come back. It’s the moral and ethical thing to do. Nothing good goes on in this place. Let’s lock the doors and leave the building to the spiders, moths, and four-legged rats."

— Robert Wenzel

"The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, ‘See if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk’"

Harry Browne

Comparative and Absolute Advantages in Task Distribution

This is a short analysis of task distribution within my own profession, hanging wallpaper.

A simple way to think about how different agents are assigned different tasks is by looking at solely two agents, A and H, and two tasks, 1 and 2, with the level of output, y, governed by y=ƒ1, τ2), where τ1 and τ2 are the amounts of task 1 and 2 carried out.  To understand which agent would perform which task more optimally it is normally assumed that the agents are heterogeneous (for if they had the same abilities to perform a task, deciding on which one would more optimally perform a task would be a pointless inquiry) and the tasks, similarly, are heterogeneous, requiring different skills.  Agent A’s ability is characterized by the pair aA1, aA2, with aAi representing the maximum amount of task i (1, 2) he can perform if he devotes all of his time to it.  Similarly, the pair (aH1, aH2) characterizes agent H’s ability.  The final assumption of the model is that agents are free to perform both tasks.

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"In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all."

— C. P. Cavafy

Tags: Quotes Cavafy

"For the gods perceive things in the future, ordinary people things in the present, but the wise perceive things about to happen."

— Philostratus

This is the first plaid shirt I’ve ever bought.  This is the first Abercrombie shirt I’ve ever bought.  It’s quite nice.  Thrift store steals are behavior changers.  Time to get back to writing papers.
[EDIT:  See my younger brother’s baby picture?  He definitely was (intentionally past tense) adorable.]

This is the first plaid shirt I’ve ever bought.  This is the first Abercrombie shirt I’ve ever bought.  It’s quite nice.  Thrift store steals are behavior changers.  Time to get back to writing papers.

[EDIT:  See my younger brother’s baby picture?  He definitely was (intentionally past tense) adorable.]

Tags: GPOY

On Bourgeois Logic

likeagswift:

freemarketliberal:

Left-wing theory of economics? What is that even supposed to mean? Economics isn’t “left” or “right” wing. There are Socialists who are Austrian. There are Republicans who are Keynesian. There are Democrats who are Neo-Classical (though it’s more rare). … In fact, most the Democrats and Republicans tend to be Neo-Liberal in their economic beliefs (just look at the trade legislations).


Left-wing economics sounds pretty foolish now I realize. You probably have a broader and more detailed knowledge of economics as a whole than me, I have a general disdain for the subject.

I’m an Econ major who focuses much time on the history of political economy alongside more fully understanding the mainstream perceptions and why they persist.  In a sense, I focus on many different types of economics out of requirement in order to go into academia in the future.  I view economics as the study of the ordinary business of life. I have no disdain for the subject; simply, I have a disdain for the boxes people are put in in order to calculate likelihoods as if their chances are deterministically true while extensively rejecting prominent features of living things and the world, randomness and therefore unpredictability.  Certainly being able to weigh out likelihoods is beneficial; but only to a degree.  If perfect knowledge existed and past events were fully understood and actions altered in accordance, then predictions based on the past would still be impossible because we wouldn’t have a data set to base possible actions on.  Anyway, this has turned into a rant.  Let’s continue.

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(Source: baseballlibertarian)