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 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 [...]
Posted in Standards of Living on Jul 11th, 2011
Allow me to make the most charitable (read: pessimistic) observation about what has happened to the incomes of the “middle-class” since 1980. Since the propitious election of Ronald Reagan, a culture of rugged individualism and corporate greed have overwhelmed the country. An unfortunate byproduct of this revolution has been the enrichment of the gilded class [...]
Posted in Standards of Living on May 2nd, 2011
The Erie Canal runs through what was formerly the Montezuma Marsh. It was once one of the largest freshwater marshes on the continent (12 miles by 8 miles) until it was drained in 1911. However, it was still intact when we decided to dig the Erie Canal through it about 100 years earlier. As we [...]
Posted in Standards of Living on Apr 11th, 2011
From the comments of this post by Don Boudreaux: But comparing the present population with those hourly workers that benefited from the prosperous 60′s and 70′s in this country the current hourly labor force is much, much worse off. I’m in no mood to rehash the debate on Tyler Cowen’s Great Stagnation thesis, or to [...]
Posted in Standards of Living on Mar 17th, 2011
I am always on the lookout for creative ways to demonstrate to my students just how remarkable the recent record of global economic growth has been, with the attendant improvement in per capita living standards. If you normalize per capita income in pre-biblical times to take a value of 1 (say, in 5000 B.C.) here [...]
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