The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in Fun Facts on Mar 9th, 2010
The Rochester City School District Graduates 47% of its students.
When Progressives talk about education, they argue that it needs to be publicly subsidized and controlled AND that the schools need adequate funding. OK, so:
But, if the school system was funded publicly and controlled by the government that wouldn’t … ahem … happen?
But, if the school [...]
Posted in Fun Facts on Feb 20th, 2010
Imagine you have a class of 110 students. Further imagine you assign the class a task to complete on their own and bring to class as part of an assignment to be completed in class. Suppose that the task you give consists of producing a chart from source data, and asking students to deliver it [...]
Posted in Fun Facts on Jan 30th, 2010
President Coolidge kept a raccoon as a pet inside the White House. I picked that up by rereading Burt Folsom’s wonderful book, The Myth of the Robber Barons.
Posted in Fun Facts, Standards of Living on Jan 6th, 2010
I was perusing the U.S. Geological Survey publications and came across this:
At the time of the U.S. Civil War, 3,000 workers produced over 225,000 tons of salt in the United States. Today, there is a third more workers, but they produce 100 times more salt.
In other words, each salt worker in 1865 was able to [...]
Posted in Fun Facts on Jan 3rd, 2010
An average horse can produce only about half a horsepower for any extended period.
HT to Kate May.
Posted in Fun Facts on Nov 29th, 2009
Henry Ford is evil. In 1904, there were 61,306 people employed in the wagon and carriage industry. Today, there are virtually zero. The wages of those workers in 1904 were about $31.2 million dollars — or about $700 million in today’s dollars. That is equivalent to destroying an asset of roughly $35 billion in value. [...]
Posted in Fun Facts, Health Care on Nov 21st, 2009
My employer is particularly “generous” in terms of the share of health insurance costs that they pay on my behalf versus the share I must contribute on my own. Our family chooses to “buy” a HSA Eligible High Deductible Health Plan. So for low premiums, we have high deductible insurance that kicks in when we [...]
Posted in Fun Facts on Nov 12th, 2009
HT: Kay May. I though there would be more density in California.
Posted in Fun Facts on Oct 28th, 2009
If I spend roughly $3 per day on coffee over a 50 year period, I am implicitly valuing coffee drinking by at least $500,000. I probably get even more satisfaction than that. And that is just on coffee. Imagine the value I get from living in a safe, comfortable home, or driving my car.
Why do [...]
Mississippi.
Did you know that the PPP adjusted output per person in Mississippi, the “poorest” state in the United States, would rank it just about equal to the output per person in France? And similarly, Mississippi is richer than places like Italy and Spain.
And you can even visit Mississippi for a fraction of the cost of [...]
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