The world has an abundance of great intellectual giants in all sorts of domains, some living and some dead. Most of us can gain a lot of knowledge and wisdom from them — if we had the time, the motivation, the inclination and the ability to do so.
Unfortunately as it happens we lack one or more of those, and can’t appreciate their works and don’t directly benefit from their genius. Most likely we’ll never be able to understand the works of the likes of Nietzsche, Ramanujan, Einstein, Hayek, Turing, et al. They are supremely important for humanity as a whole but we ordinary individuals gain very little practical wisdom from them.
Instead we are more likely to gain quite a bit from much lesser people. Why? Because they are not that far removed from us in our mundane lives. I call them “persons with mundane practical wisdom.” Continue reading
In a comment 
“The tragedy of collectivist thought is that while it starts out to 
In a comment to a post, Prabhudesai asked “Is competition always good?” The simple answer is “It depends.” It depends on the circumstances and on whether one gains or loses from competition.
We humans value economic goods. But everything we value doesn’t necessarily have to be an economic good. What’s the defining characteristic? The demand for the good has to exceed the supply for it to be thought of as an economic good.
Prabhudesai referred to JEE (Joint Entrance Exam) in a comment and wrote, “An examination that has too much of competition resulting to very high cost of producing one engineer. For a poor country like India it is a massive blow.”
Is that type of competition good? That is socially wasteful competition. It belongs to a broad class of activities that are technically known as “rent seeking.”
One of the principal ways of obtaining wealth is by earning a profit. Profits are the difference between the cost of producing something and the price obtained from its sale. Profits indicate that wealth has been created and value delivered. Rent seeking occurs when one attempts to obtain some wealth without actually creating wealth.
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