Economics

It is often called the dismal science. More than any other science, it is one of the most challenging sciences, as it is almost impossible to conduct experiments.

Isaac Newton said he could predict the motion of heavenly motions but not the madness of people.

In Lectures , I link to the course Introduction to Micro Economics, which was an excellent introduction to some of the good cases. I especially liked the example of the taxi industry in NY. What was the welfare function of restricting the supply of taxis, who got them? Taxi Cab Medalion Owners

Links

• Jevons paradox, where technical progress or governmental policy increases the efficiency of a resource, but the falling cost of use increases the demand. An example of this is when IBM introduced email. The capacity of the servers was based upon the number of faxes and memos going internally, but after a few days, the server blew because employees were communicating five to six times more than they had before mail.
• Thinking Fast and Slopes
• Aggregation theory Zero distribution costs. Zero marginal costs. Zero transactions.
• • On optimizing for low-probability events
• Article on cooperation and how it increases welfare
• Baumol Effect - Wages in low productivity increasing sectors have to increase to compete with higher productivity sectors
• Blog series about things like economics. Also, there are some funny takedowns of N.N. Taleb, who could use a couple of tablespoons of humblebrew.
• Wrights Law About the decreasing cost of goods with an increase in production.
• Monopsony A single buyer controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services. Oligopsony is the same but just a few major purchasers

Thoughts

• Lewis's Turning Point is a fascinating concept; according to Marx's economics theory, there would be constant exploitation; however, he did not account for the fact that the labor supply is not infinite. If this is the case, then Marx would be right.
• Giffen goods are an exciting concept because some goods will increase demand if they increase in price. Think of rice, potatoes, etc. I do not think it has ever been a case of this actually happening. Also, not the Veblen Good, which shows the price also increases demand but describes "high-quality" goods, such as luxury items. This might be related to Kahneman and Tversky´s research.