On Monday, August 12, 2019 at 7:52:27 PM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/12/2019 1:35 PM, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Monday, August 12, 2019 at 9:47:25 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Sunday, August 11, 2019 at 2:58:53 PM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/10/2019 10:39 PM, news18 wrote:
On Sat, 10 Aug 2019 14:55:26 -0700, Andre Jute wrote:

On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 8:08:11 PM UTC+1, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:45:45 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 9:01:33 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 4:16:53 PM UTC+1, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 7:21:12 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute
wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 3:41:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote:
On 8/9/2019 9:21 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
On Saturday, August 10, 2019 at 1:23:24 AM UTC+1, AMuzi
wrote:
On 8/9/2019 6:10 PM, Andre Jute wrote:
Andre Jute Economics isn't difficult: it is the
commonsense activities of individuals considered in
aggregate.


???

If the query is about the tagline to my sig, many
economists with real life experience in business are
moving away from the first two great commandments of
classical economics, viz that all individuals in every
market are fully informed and fully rational in every
decision. That is clearly not so. We don't need to go
further afield than RBT for an example.

Of course we don't go as far as Krugman, who is so
Post-Modern, he's totally unmoored from reality, indeed
he's unattached to anything he said yesterday or the day
before, though in a few days he'll probably spout the
same weirdness as he did a couple of weeks ago. In fact,
he's so cyclically insane, we should make him an honorary
member of RBT.

Andre Jute Sane since I was 13. I wonder how I managed
that.


Krugman is indeed unhinged and he was even before Trump
Derangement Syndrome.


I must quibble that although many individual investors are
frequently wrong, and provably so, the wisdom of crowds is
a real thing and an amazingly reliable economic indicator.
Nor infallible, but amazingly prescient usually.

I agree. However, the mob is never right. The trick is to
distinguish the mob from the crowd.



Andre Jute I can't believe the foolishness of historians
who equate the French and American Revolutions. The French
wanted to raise a ravening mob of murderers, the American
Founding Fathers created the Electoral College and other
enduring institutions specifically to defend minorities
against the mob.


No one understood it better than Burke:

https://www.alibris.com/Reflections-...Revolution-in-
France-Edmund-Burke/book/5612177?matches=601

An excellent short read and starting at just 99 cents.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

Thanks, Andrew. I know it, and in fact have it (free from
Project Gutenberg) on iBooks to read on my treadmill, but first
I want to read Thomas Carlyle History of the French Revolution
again, to which Burke makes a suitable coda. At the moment I'm
working my way through Stephen Meyers Darwin's Doubt, which may
be the most important book of the century so far, and Carlyle
is next. He's an agreeable stylist and a meticulous historian,
so I won't be rushing the pleasure.


Pffff (blowing out coffee). Darwin's Doubt the most important
book of the century so far?

The only thing more important than where we came from is where
we're going. Any ideas?

Yikes, an ID book?

Have you actually read it? I haven't finished it but I'm far enough
to know that his dissection of all the other theories is
fair-minded and persausive.

No, I've only read the reviews -- and I will admit my prejudices,
which a (1) whenever I finish a book that involves religion or
philosophy chasing science, or vice versa, I feel like I've wasted my
time. The book may illuminate some current controversy, but that
controversy is usually gone in ten years or has mutated like a virus
into a different controversy. It started out as creationism, mutated
into intelligent design and will be something different in five years
-- maybe go back to ancient astronauts or the Illuminati. Meanwhile,
the actual scientific community plods along with evolution. One hopes
for primary work that really proves something rather than a curated,
retrospective review of prior research with a new gloss. (2) I'm not
against God or intelligent design, but really, if you were an
all-powerful God, would you create a Trilobite? Why not a dog or a
Swedish bikini model. The God envisioned by these people is so lame.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay, I don't think that you realize the problems with Darwin. While
improvement of the species certainly is possible in the time since
Darwin we have never witnessed speciation due to evolution.

Just the human genome itself would require about several thousand
mutations per second since life first appeared on Earth to have reached
the present point of development. The numbers are simply far too large
for Darwin's theories to ever work on the large scale necessary.

The probabilistic difficulty is worse even than that, Tom. Forget
humans, which are a large, complex afterthought to upright apes which
are already impossible to explain, and let's just stick to the large
animals in the Cambrian Era. It turns out, if you work the numbers, that
protein A seeking protein B will have to do it blindfold in a genetic
space larger than all the atoms in the cosmos, littered with ineffectual
rubbish proteins, and that's just to make one cell. It will take more
than all the time since the Earth was created (about 3.8bn years).

That concept is more akin to the evolution of human knowledge, much of
which can be shown to have independently evolved in different places..
There is no evidence to support that there was ever one protein A seeking
one protein B.


Andre Jute The cutting edge

From the man who thinks that giddens wrote the history of the world.


He actually did. Or at l;east everything worth knowing:

https://www.alibris.com/Gibbons-Decl...438?matches=65

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

And the rest is iteration of history's failures by those who didn't read Gibbon, an awful lesson? Actually the Middle Ages were a time of peace and plenty for most people as the Roman Church spread agricultural best practice through the Christian world, which for a good long time was nearly co-terminous with the Roman Empire, and presumably at least a bit beyond its borders, and there was global warming which also lifted everyone's spirits and standard of living. But that's at least partly a lesson in the power of communication, belonging to economic history, while Gibbon's main theme is arguably one of morality, duty and sacrifice; those old Romans who built the upstanding republic and later the decadent empire were pretty grim, not a giggle* among the lot of them.

In one school vacation I led a blind lawyer around and in the evenings read to him. He was a fast listener, so I read at a fast clip, and finished the libretto of Da Ponte's Don Giovanni in an evening with time to spare before his bedtime, so, after a few valuable tips on my Italian pronunciation (blind people listen better!), he told me I could choose the next volume from his shelf. Not wanting to be obvious and choose my own fave, Shakespeare, I chose Gibbon. "No, no," he said, "that bloody man is a moralist. Choose a realist. Goethe! Let's have Faustus." By the time I'd read aloud through most of Goethe in gloomy German, I was absolutely convinced that the only thing worse than a moralist is a romantic.

Andre Jute
No lace curtains to twitch

*Robert Graves presents Tiberius as amused by his nephew Caligula's viciousness but Tiberius was such a self-centred sourpuss, one has to wonder if this is literary latitude or lasitude on the part of Graves.

That is a strong point. During the time that the Roman Empire was supposedly "conquering the world" they brought peace and prosperity to most of it.