To quote Dan Bordeaux in a letter to the Washington Times: The ultimate tragedy in Haiti isn’t the earthquake; it’s that country’s lack of economic freedom. The earthquake simply but catastrophically revealed the inhuman consequences of this fact. Since the disaster many people have been urging world governments to “drop the debt” that Haiti owes….
Tag: Economics
Economics and Ecology
I’m a big fan of the VlogBrothers, two brothers who make daily youtube videos addressed to each other (but also to a wider audience). In today’s video one of the brothers, Hank, attempts to give the other brother – and the rest of the viewers – a quick overview of “Ecosystem Services“. To quote Hank…
Murdoch’s Paywall
There has been a lot debate online recently surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s change of mind about paywalls for his online newspapers. I’ve been reading a huge number of arguments on both sides (including a 40min video interview with Rupert himself) and am sad to say that most of them seem to be missing the point. Earlier…
Growth, Reproduction, Generations and The Recession
I was going to call this post “How Darwin could help us out of this recession” in honour of his 200th Birthday today. Apologies in advance for the length, but I hope it’s worth it. The last book I finished reading was Richard Dawkins‘ The Extended Phenotype. It was fantastic. Although it has given my…
Wants, Needs and the Spectrum of Desire
I enjoy reading Seth Godin’s blog. He often has really clever insights and ideas about marketing and business, and his books are very good too. Recently he wrote a post entitled Hungry. An excerpt: By any traditional definition of the word, she wasn’t actually hungry. She didn’t need more fuel to power her through an…