Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in Fun Facts, Government Gone Wild, Price System on Mar 3rd, 2013
I just perused this report for a short section in class I have next week (see table 5). This is a table showing workplace injury rates (full disclosure: if you examine the table for mortality you get dramatically different results, a point we may address shortly). The annual workplace injury rate for people working in oil and […]
Posted in Economists, Fun Facts on Feb 9th, 2013
The table below illustrates one reason why I remain astounded at how the “popular” view of economists has come to be what it is. I sense that the popular view paints us all as market-fundamentalist, anti-tax, anti-regulation, uber-rational, etc. supporters. If political identity actually tells us what we think it does, […]
You know, there are actually folks out here in the world that want to understand what the heck we actually know and don’t know. And it’s not particularly helpful when the alarmosphere and denial-osphere can’t have a reasonable discussion. Not only have we talked here about the lack of consensus on what, exactly, is the […]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Fun Facts, Methodology on Nov 25th, 2012
I believe I was reading a book review the other day of a book by philosopher Thomas Nagel. The book basically argues that science is going to have a difficult time, at some point, proving everything. He also seems to be making the argument in the book that we seem to be evolving toward some higher-order species, […]
Posted in Fun Facts on Nov 11th, 2012
There are estimates that each year during the NCAA Basketball Tournament millions of hours of worker time is “wasted” by watching the games during work, checking scores, running gambling pools and other distractions. However research by the same firm has concluded that in some years, the “losses” are almost miniscule (a few hundred million dollars) […]
Posted in Education, Entrepreneurs, Fun Facts, Market Failures on Oct 29th, 2012
A canard of the uninformed left is that capitalism leads to monopoly – which of course requires either the elimination of capitalism or the heavily regulation of it by … a … monopoly with guns. And never mind the actual history of anti-trust, which originates in the “Progressive” movement and is now manifest in the […]
I was surprised to learn, upon browsing through a recent edition of the Digest of Education Statistics, that parental involvement in their children’s educations has been steadily increasing for a decade. And it has been true across all ethnic and income classes as well. To cite one example, in 1999, 36.8% of all children had […]
Posted in Fun Facts on Oct 5th, 2012
From Tim Taylor: “Between 2000 and 2010, there was a 67 percent increase in home-based work for employees of private companies. Although still underrepresented among homebased workers, the largest increase in home-based work during this decade was among government workers, increasing 133 percent among state government workers and 88 percent among federal government workers.” I have this […]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Fun Facts, Methodology on Sep 25th, 2012
In 1984, Americans spent about 0.6% of their after-tax incomes on “reading.” Today, the BLS reports that Americans spend less than 0.2% of their after-tax income on “reading.” Oh, I know the explanation. We must be reading 67% less! I have a great idea. Let’s ban anything that might distract us from reading books that […]
Posted in Fun Facts on Sep 23rd, 2012
Which number do you think is larger? The number of deaths annually due to automobiles in the United States. Or the number of fatalities around the entire world due to extreme weather events? The answer itself proves nothing of course.