I think when people discuss the motivations of human interaction (politics, history, and economics included) they often don’t realize that they understand many of the relevant factors, but they often overvalue and undervalue certain ones. For example, I tend to think historians overvalue leadership and undervalue economics.
Tag: economics
A Little Learning Is A Dangerous Thing
On the drive to work this morning, I was listening to an audiobook, This Idea Is Brilliant. The second essay in this compilation really caught my imagination; The “Illusion of Explanatory Depth” by psychologist Adam Waytz. It refers to the general existence of wide information, but with shallow understanding.
On the Minimum Wage II
If you support enforcing a minimum wage, ask yourself two questions: 1) why not triple or quadruple the current minimum wage?, and 2) why doesn’t every wage rise when the minimum wage is raised? I do not believe these questions can be answered without acknowledging basic truths about economics, truths which necessarily reveal the absurdity in enforcing a minimum wage.
New Tariffs Nothing to Cheer About
Some American workers are cheering President Trump’s new tariffs. They know not what they cheer. Tariffs are as bad for you and me — economically — as taxing corporations. It’s a great plan — if your goal is to economically cripple America.
Be All, End All
There is no entity that can do defense, imperialism, law enforcement, infrastructure, pharmaceutical, diplomacy, security, education, politics, travel, migration, housing, care for the aged, care for the disabled, economics, finance, agriculture, stewardship, and so forth, and so on.
The Delusion of a Win-Win Trade War
The foregoing considerations are only a few of the many that weigh against the initiation and continuation of a trade war. Trump says such wars are easy to win. In this regard, he apparently doesn’t even understand what winning means.
The Social Capital Economics of Over-Apologizing
Acting in the world requires a tolerance for failure, which requires a tolerance for what for some people is the most difficult form of failure: disappointing or pissing other people off. You are going to burn social capital with other people, no matter what.
The Voluntaryist Ethnicity
As my family has traveled the country and met or stayed with other voluntaryists and unschoolers, I can’t help but notice certain general customs among people and families of this kind. Without putting anybody in a box or limiting how it is expressed or experienced, here is the voluntaryist ethnicity as I’ve seen it.
Markets aren’t Miraculous; God Bless the World
I was wrong to ever describe anything the market does as a miracle or as miraculous. Why? Because the positive effects of markets broadly described above do not depend on any sort of divine intervention, and its totally ridiculous to say that they do. Rather, they are the natural result of individuals and groups engaging in market action. No divine explanation necessary.
The Balance of International Payments Is Economic Nonsense
Nations as such don’t gain or lose from trade; only individual traders do. If the trades into which these people voluntarily enter entice them by the prospect of mutual gain, it simply cannot be the case that the sum total of their transactions amounts to a bad deal.