Reverie

“Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine — the special pleading of selfish interests.” — Henry Hazlitt, “Economics In One Lesson” (1946)

In 1997, $1 of new [money] increased GDP by $2.20. [Now] it is $1.43. The money multiplier is the amount of money that banks generate with each dollar of reserves. Due to the over-indebtedness of the economy—or more precisely, the lack of “savings”—the multiplier has plunged from 12.1 in 1985, to 3.6 today. Velocity of money s an indicator of how much it is used. Money can go into productive--reusable--projects or in to unproductive--in-reusable projects:

Sources: Hosington Investment Management

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ABC News reports a new study by the CDC analyzing “500,000 privately insured pregnant women in 2014...found that about 70% of women in the first trimester received antibiotics for UTIs.” However, the piece says that some of “these medications have been associated with birth defects, including brain malformations, heart defects, and cleft lips and palates, in past studies, though more recent studies have shown the link might not be as strong.”

Who is....George Gilder



"The minimum wage, too, is high in South Africa. The Congress of South African Trade Unions insists on it. COSATU had an honorable role in the struggle against apartheid, and is viewed with indulgence by politicians. The result is that low-wage workers cannot compete with trade unionists. The poor sit in huts in the countryside of Kwa-Zulu Natal, pacified by a small income subsidy to someone in the family. Low-skilled people, such as young people, don’t have a chance."--McCloskey


Descriptively, we now live in what might best be called “constitutional anarchy,” where the range and the extent of federal government dominance over all our lives, over our private behavior, is largely dependent on the accidental preferences of politicians in judicial, legislative, and executive positions of power.  Increasingly, men feel themselves at the mercy of a faceless bureaucracy, itself irresponsible and subject to unpredictable twists and turns that destroy and distort personal and private expectations.--Buchanan

George Gilder is a guy with a different angle on most things. He has written that we need a new economics, an economics that avoids laws and no longer analyzes the past. He writes the economy is driven not by “centralized” institutions wielding rewards and punishments, but by an ever-growing pool of knowledge. This knowledge is the source of wealth: wealth that is ultimately distributed throughout an economy. This sounds much like McCloskey.

But here’s a crucial point: Entrepreneurial creations—the source of wealth—are unpredictable and always come as a surprise. Gilder often quotes former Princeton economist Albert Hirshman on this: “Creativity always comes as a surprise to us. If it didn’t, we would not need it; we could plan it.”

Believe it or not there is an economic theoretical basis for what Gilder is saying.The fundamental principal of information theory is that all information is surprise; only surprise qualifies as information. Gilder  recognized the tie between entrepreneurial surprise and information theory: “Claude Shannon defined information as surprise, and Albert Hirshman defined entrepreneurship as surprise. Here we have a crucial tie between the economy and information theory. For the first time, it became possible to create an economics that could capture the surprising creativity of entrepreneurs.




One of the curious themes of the Alabama election is that these difficult choices between really bad people with bad behavior and ideas is somehow seen as unusual in American politics.

Chris talked passionately about the internet bullying case--the first I had heard of it. My take is that safety of children in a school is a simple and unarguable responsibility of educators and that making it more complex is either insincere or cowardly. That said, I read this this morning, showing how complex we have become: "The administrator of a GoFundMe drive that has collected nearly $60,000 for bullied child-turned-viral sensation Keaton Jones has halted the drive after Jones’ mother, Kimberly Jones, was accused of racism." (yahoo)

Boustrophedonan: an ancient method of writing in which the lines run alternately from right to left and from left to right. A word with a wonderful origin.
Only students of ancient scripts, especially (but not exclusively) of ancient Greek, will know the meaning and etymology of boustrophedon “like the ox turns (in plowing).” The major components of the Greek adverb boustrophēdón are the nouns boûs (stem, bou-) “bull, cow, ox,” and strophḗ “a turn, twist.” In the earliest Greek writing (mid-8th century b.c.), the first line was written from right to left (“retrograde,” as always in Phoenician and Hebrew); the second line from left to right; the third line retrograde, etc. Boustrophedonic writing was obsolete in Athens and most other parts of Greece by the mid-5th century b.c. Boustrophedon entered English in the 18th century.

The maximum known depth of Mariana Trench in the western Pacific is 10,994m (36,070 ft.). For example if Mount Everest(8,848m) was dropped in Mariana Trench its peak would still be over 1.6 km underwater.

The NFL Network has suspended three members of its on-air team—Marshall Faulk, Ike Taylor and Heath Evans—in response to allegations of sexual harassment made in a lawsuit by a former employee.

Golden oldie: http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/01/sunspot.html

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steeleydock: Sunspot steeleydock.blogspot.com This is the Sun on January 6, 2014 with a "small" area at about ten o'clock off center. That is a sunspot about the size of the earth. Sunspots were not ...

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The courts are determining who the military can pick for soldiers. Should pacifists be able to enlist?

In 1976 Bellow accepted the Nobel Prize for literature. In his speech he said: "After years of the most arduous mental labor, I stand before you in the costume of a headwaiter" and "All I started out to do was show up my brothers. I didn't have to go this far."

There is a flurry of complaints about politicians and their intrusion into the lives of others to satisfy their personal--in these instances sexual-- desires. But sexual demands are only one of the intrusions these people make. This is what they do; with great arrogance and righteousness they are always making some unwanted demand on the people. Before democracy this kind of thing was done at the point of a sword. Now they feel entitled to the people and the land.

On September 10th, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," after a Pentagon whistleblower set off a probe. A day later, the September 11th attacks happened and the accounting scandal was quickly forgotten.

The stock market at record highs, the bond returns at record lows, the volatility at record lows--what is that thesis about when an avalanche isn't, and then is?

I read that Bulgaria seized a lot of property in an anti-corruption police action and now holds $3 billion in Bitcoins.

(The Princess Diana's Benny Baby sold at its high for 24 thousand dollars.)

From a study of 95 students (75 of whom returned for a second session) at the University of Waterloo: The students were tested on their ability to recall written information inputted in four different ways -- reading silently, hearing someone else read, listening to a recording of oneself reading, and reading aloud in real time. They were tested on recollection of short, four-to-six letter words on a list of 160 terms. The results show that reading information aloud to oneself led to the best recall. Oral production is effective because it has two distinctive components, a motor or speech act and a personal auditory input, the researchers explain. "[The] results suggest that production is memorable in part because it includes a distinctive, self-referential component. This may well underlie why rehearsal is so valuable in learning and remembering," the study concludes. "We do it ourselves, and we do it in our own voice. When it comes time to recover the information, we can use this distinctive component to help us to remember."

Fifteen percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 – who should be in their most productive years of contributing to their families and society – don’t even want a job. That’s up from 5% in the mid-’60s, and the number has been steadily rising. Fifty-six percent of these people receive federal disability payments, averaging about $13,000, which is roughly equivalent to the pay for a minimum-wage job, after taxes – except that disability comes with free Medicare. Unless these people find ways to develop needed skills, there is not much financial incentive for them to look for jobs.

If you play poker on-line, how do you know your opponent's computer can not read your cards?

AAAAaaaaannnnnndddddd......a graph:

Sources: St Louis Fed

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