Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
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 You Can't Have it Both Ways on Oct 23rd, 2009
Last week, several sites linked to this article in the NY Times discussing how Saudi Arabia hopes the be compensated for their losses if the world moves away from oil. I suspect many of you would find this laughable, and that was the intent of those links. However, before you chuckle too hard at the […]
Posted in Competition on Aug 21st, 2009
Curt Sampson’s biography of legendary golfer Ben Hogan is choc full of economics: After 40 years in Dublin, the Hogans left the town in June 1921 for Fort Worth. It is uncertain if the Hogan children had ever been to the big city before, although Cowtown had a new attraction that was drawing people from […]
Posted in Competition on Aug 7th, 2009
Just finished reading a few passages from Stephen Marglin’s critique of the way “thinking like an economist” undermines community – called “The Dismal Science.” It is not a polemic, the title notwithstanding, but there are some points worth talking about later on in terms of the conclusions he draws about the problems with “capitalism” (e.g. […]