the book is flat April 30, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : other , add a commentVia a post over at Pure Pedantry on the economics of over-priced and under-qualified textbooks for college students, I find Flat World Knowledge. Their goal, it seems, is to produce highly-qualified textbooks for (almost) the lowest of prices: free.
Tags for this article: books , economics , open access
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weekly quote #26: Samuel Bowles April 29, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : economics , add a commentI’m continuing to work my way through Samuel Bowles’s Microeconomics, which was the source of last week’s quote. In my humble opinion, especially given my own idiosyncratic interests in certain particular aspects of economics and behavior and the detached arguments of the Ayn Rand school of thought, this one (page 268 of my copy, from chapter 8, with citation of Coase’s “The institutional structure of production” in the original) is even better. It summarizes a description of an employee-employer contractual relationship that takes into account the realities of human interaction:
“There are three basic ingredients of a more adequate model. The first is the insight of Ronald Coase, mentioned at the close of chapter 7, that “what are traded on the market are not, as is often supposed by economists, physical entities, but the rights to perform certain actions.” The second is Marx’s commonplace that exchange requires the owners of the productive services to interact face to face. The third is Henry Ford’s discovery that employees may reciprocate good pay with hard work.”
Tags for this article: economics , quotation
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cute talking heads April 28, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : society , add a commentOvercoming Bias (with Freakonomics) on why I don’t watch television news: everyone else is watching it, and they therefore decide how the programming is run.
Tags for this article: society , stupidity
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weekly photo #77: Surf April 28, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : other , add a comment
I took this last December — unfortunately, I’ve not much to say about it, just some surf breaking on the shoreline of the Monterey Peninsula. Incidentally, that’s Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in the right background.
Tags for this article: art , California , photos
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our own worst enemy April 27, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : society , add a commentI found Kishore Mabubani’s article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “The case against the West”, to be quite interesting as a presentation of how the West — and its failures — is viewed in the non-Western world. The article isn’t available online other than in preview form (unless you pay for it); but I daresay it’s worth a trip to the local bookstore and to read it — and one should probably read Richard N. Haass’s “The age of nonpolarity”, which is also interesting and bears no small connection to Mr. Kishore’s article. The Haass article is available in its entirety online.
Tags for this article: arms control , politics , society
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re-creativity April 25, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : other , add a commentVia The Filter^, a Flickr collection by Balakov of re-created famous photos using Lego blocks.
I’m quite partial to this one:
Tags for this article: art , photos
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blame-morality April 25, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : society , add a commentRobin Hanson and a working paper and morality as a blame-game rather than normative–system–facilitating–co-existence.
Tags for this article: morality
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wine psych April 25, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : food & drink, society , add a commentVia Mind Hacks, an article from The Psychologist about wine — plenty of stuff in there regardless of whether you’re more interested in vino than in psych, or vice versa.
Tags for this article: drink , science , wine
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weekly photo #76: Common Virtue April 24, 2008
Posted by ocmpoma in : other , add a comment
This week’s photo is edited to remove some people and signs… The USMC War Memorial offers a pretty nice view of the Mall across the river; inside the gold-leaf circle is a snippet of the Admiral Nimitz quote which I used for the photo’s title: “…uncommon valor was a common virtue.”
