As much as I enjoy it, I think I have to stop listening to music: at some point it has become inimical to my ability to think. It doesn't hamper my ability to carry on a train of thought - but it does seem to reduce my desire to.

Browsing the web, I stumbled across the phrase "cornflower blue sky" and, in some deep recess of my mind , started laughing.

It took me a while to remember why...

The New Industrial State is a pretty bad description of post-financialization USA; shareholders have re-asserted control over the capital they own. But it does strike me as a pretty good description of any country politically dominated by conglomerates, e.g., Japan. With some modifications, elements of the idea could apply to Singapore ( Read more... )

So what's "shoppe"? Shop 2.0?

Austrian calculation must be costly, to agents in the Austrian world; otherwise it would resolve virtually instantly and therefore transform into the neoclassical universe. So there are distributional issues involved here in who, eventually, pays said cost; we can argue, as the Austrians often do, that any attempt to alleviate this issue will ( Read more... )

I derive way too much satisfaction arguing with people who I know are not well-placed to formulate effective counter-argument.

From The Representative Agent in Macroeconomics, Hartley, p190-191:

In a remarkable series of papers, Sonnenschein (1972, 1973, 1973), Mantel (1974, 1976), Debreu (1974), and Mas-Colell (1977) showed that in an economy in which every individual well-behaved excess demand function, there are only three restrictions on the aggregate excess demand ( Read more... )

SNOOOOOW

SNOOOOOOOOW

(dog pawprints in snow are what makes it for me, I think. I always wonder what the dog that made them thinks of the snow. An unanswerable question - what is it like to be a dog? - but I never stop wondering)

Just has a mathematical econ test.

It is nice to know I could answer the "prove $ARCANE_RESULT" bonus question by spotting the trick in under thirty seconds. It wasn't so nice to find out that it was all in the totally-not-gonna-be-tested appendices to the lecture notes, though...

Note to self: don't try to cook spaghetti in a hurry again.