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 Standards of Living on May 6th, 2012
I really should spend more time reading and writing about Chesterton. Try this one on: “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, [...]
Posted in Standards of Living on Mar 24th, 2012
From a story on the Memristor: When Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of the transistor in 1948, the press release boasted that “more than a hundred of them can easily be held in the palm of the hand.” Today, you can hold more than 100 billiontransistors in your hand. What’s more, those transistors cost less [...]
Posted in Environment, Standards of Living on Mar 16th, 2012
What’s problematic with this story?
Posted in Standards of Living on Mar 5th, 2012
Not that game silly, the real thing: The role of twentieth-century agricultural mechanization in changing the productivity, employment opportunities, and appearance of rural America has long been appreciated. Less attention has been paid to the impact made by farm tractors, combines, and associated equipment on the standard of living of the U.S. population as a whole. This paper demonstrates, [...]
Posted in Resources, Standards of Living on Jan 16th, 2012
A former student sends me the link to this amazing video. Julian Simon (as close to an intellectual hero as I have) called people the Ultimate Resource. Here is an example of why. Keep this in mind when you hear people worrying about 1.4 billion Chinese getting richer than us, or trying to convince you [...]
Posted in Fun Facts, Standards of Living on Oct 22nd, 2011
This website tells us that the average American watches 4 hours of TV per day. That sounds high to me, so let’s cut that in half, to two hours per day. A few posts ago I mentioned how great the iPod economy was. Here is what I forgot to mention or try to quantify. My [...]
Posted in Standards of Living on Oct 18th, 2011
Just awesome. Thanks Alex for sharing!
Posted in Standards of Living on Oct 8th, 2011
Sorry folks but devices that are discovered to overcome our problems do not themselves become necessities. Preserving food is a necessity, a fridge isn’t.
Posted in Standards of Living on Aug 20th, 2011
Here’s a weekend thought. Please answer for yourself the following two questions: (1) Do you think the world’s richest countries (roughly the OECD countries) can grow at a rate of 1% per year over the next century? (I mean real, per-capita, growth). Note that this is less than half of their growth rate during the [...]
Posted in Environment, Standards of Living on Aug 6th, 2011
Here is an illustration of a company that is working to solve one of the world’s most important problems: indoor air pollution. Estimates place diseases due to indoor air pollution (mostly caused by cooking over open fires indoors) as the killer of over 1.5 million people per year. That makes indoor air pollution the 8th [...]
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