Tag: Miscellaneous

What mattered to Richard Rorty was not the search for what is true, but the search for what works. And that is what economists can learn from him. The test of a model, a way of thinking, or a theory, is not truth, but usefulness.

The economic case for separatism is that it removes the focus of grievance and the source of subsidy and makes Scotland again responsible for its economic destiny.

The appeal of separatism in modern Scotland is linked to the country’s relative economic decline, as self- congratulation turns to grievance in response to failure.

The paradox is that if you do not have complete control over your emotions, you can have too much information for your own good.

Congestion charging can have a substantial effect on behaviour, but busy commercial centres tend to derive their advantages from the clustering of business activities, which cannot function without large-scale transport of people and goods.

If the measure of skill is how often good performance repeats itself, poker is a more skilful activity than investment management.

In all areas of human endeavour, there are hard data and soft data. The happiness of a society or the progress of a civilisation, are multi-dimensional: components are determined by subjective consensus, not objective measurement.

Environmentalism offers an alternative account of the natural world to the religious and an alternative anti-capitalist account of the political world to the Marxist. The rise of environmentalism parallels in time and place the decline of religion and of socialism.

Technology, globalisation and competition drive prices down. The status of positional goods, the rising cost of domestically produced labour-intensive services and the absence of vigorous competition push prices and inequality up.

One of the most important, and least widely understood, ideas in economics is the importance of convexity – our preference for averages over extremes.