Sep 28
1. Well, maybe this will help the unemployment problem among some
lawyers... (HT: MR)
2. Fisher
explains his dissent in the recent FOMC vote. He starts with a joke tying a sign at a Norwegian military base to monetary policy...
“Theory is when you understand everything, but nothing works.”
“Practice is when everything works, but nobody understands why.”
“At this station, theory and practice are united, so nothing works and nobody understands why.”
3. Should utilitarians promote utilitarianism?
"They found a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas (push the fat guy off the bridge) and personalities that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless."
4. Eurozone timeline. What could possibly go wrong?
Sep 23
Gary Johnson
raises the statewide speed limit to 75 miles per hour.
Your choice, Republicans.
Sep 16
1. A
1998 economist article on German Unions. They seem to have acted rationally in the face of globalization. Can anyone imagine labor unions in the United States being this cooperative?
"SPIEGEL: Are you familiar with the Eighth Commandment?
Juncker: Of course. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
SPIEGEL: Apparently you don't take it very seriously. More than two weeks ago, you denied a report
by SPIEGEL ONLINE about a secret meeting of several European Union finance ministers to discuss the situation in Greece, even though the official limousines were already pulling up in Luxembourg.
Juncker: The most important commandment is not to inflict harm on others. Although it isn't stated quite that way in the Ten Commandments, it follows from them. The finance ministers of several Euro Group nations had agreed to meet on Friday with the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Jean-Claude Trichet. Because the financial markets in Europe were still open and trading was still underway on Wall Street, we had to deny the existence of the meeting. Otherwise the course of the euro against the dollar, which had already fallen as a result of your report, would have plunged disastrously."
The key takeaway here is that there is a subset of people running Europe who are dedicated to preventing harm and are unlikely to tell the truth.
3. Thomas Schelling on the
lack of nuclear terrorism. (HT: MR) Other evidence might be inferred from the lack of a real coordinated terrorist attack in recent years since Sept 11. Perhaps there are very few people intelligent enough to pull off an operation on a large scale in the developed world who become terrorists, or maybe the people with the necessary human capital and the desire to cause harm to innocents are very wary of working with anyone else (think of lone terrorists like the Unabomber), suspecting that their potential allies are more likely to be undercover operatives.
