Category: Uncategorized

Nicely done video showing how the top 10 countries with the highest GDP 1960-2017. It’s fascinating to watch the transition of China from being fairly irrelevant to being a world economic power. Note that India (thanks to Nehruvian socialism) is still struggling to be relevant. Do watch the video full-screen mode.

It’s nice to see the transitions as a movie. However I recommend pausing the video at each year and noting the size of each economy. We should note that the data is regarding the GDP, not per capita GDP. So when China’s GDP is smaller than France’s, for example, we have to appreciate that China’s population was 10 times that of France. The gap between par capita GDP in the world is immense.

No, because monster “is too forgiving a word for his depravity.”

Lord Acton’s claim that “great men are almost always bad men”[1] holds broadly for the great leaders (men and women) of the world. I think the larger the nation or country, that tendency to badness in leaders tends to get exaggerated. The US produces some of the worst excesses of the abuse of power since the US is such a powerful nation. One example of a terrible person is Harry S Truman, who became the president of the US upon the death of President Franklin D Roosevelt in April 1945.

Here’s an article by  David S. D’Amato, “Everything Wrong with the Truman Administration“, which asks, “Was Harry Truman one of the worst terrorists of all time?” and answers, “If words mean anything anymore—then absolutely, yes.” Continue reading “Was Truman a Monster? No.”

It’s delightful to read well-written prose. In the following, the author Mark Vanhoenacker, a professional pilot, writes like a poet. I love everything related to aviation. Hence I recommend this to you.

A Pilot Explains Waypoints, the Hidden Geography of the Sky

An airplane navigates through the sky along a route composed of beacons and waypoints. Waypoints are defined by geographic coordinates or their bearing and distance from a beacon, and by a name, which typically takes the form of a five-letter capitalized word—EVUKI, JETSA, SABER. The idea is that they will be pronounceable and distinct to controllers and pilots regardless of their first language. The pilot’s map of the world, and the flight computers’ too, is atomized into these waypoints. They are the smallest nuggets of aerial geography, and in some sense the only such unit that matters once you leave the runway. They are the sky’s audible currency of place. … Continue reading “Reading: Waypoints in the Sky”

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Herr Professor Doktor Friedrich August von Hayek.

Since Hayek was an Austrian, the birthday greetings in German is appropriate, wouldn’t you say? He was born May 8th, 1899, and died 23rd March at the age of 92 in 1992.

Hayek was the greatest philosopher of liberty and freedom of the 20th century CE. He was an economist but like Adam Smith, he was a master of moral philosophy. In celebration, here are a few quotes that I like you to read. Continue reading “Happy 120th Birthday, Prof Friedrich Hayek”

Any theory of collective choice must attempt to explain or to describe the means through which conflicting interests are reconciled. In a genuine sense, economic theory is also a theory of collective choice, and, as such, provides us with an explanation of how separate individual interests are reconciled through the mechanism of trade or exchange. Indeed, when individual interests are assumed to be identical, the main body of economic theory vanishes. If all men were equal in interest and in endowment, natural or artificial, there would be no organized economic activity to explain. Each man would be a Crusoe. Economic theory thus explains why men co-operate through trade: They do so because they are different.

The above is a quote from the book The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, published in 1962 (available for free at the Online Library of Liberty.) Continue reading “Economic Theory is a Theory of Collective Choice”

• We individually consume practically nothing of what we produce
• No one knows how to make a smartphone or a commercial jetliner
• Planning mostly does not work
• Some dictatorships work
• Poverty will be over across the world by 2035
• The so-called “natural resources” are all man-made
• We will never run out of natural resources — we will keep making more natural resources
• Ideas matter more than stuff
• The poor of today are richer than the richest of yesterday — and the richest of today will be poorer than the poor of tomorrow
• Climate change is not a problem, just like the population problem before it
• DEMOCRACY has little to do with FREEDOM

 

Without a doubt, Pat Condell is one of the most articulate, hard-hitting commentators in the English-speaking world. He certainly has the gift of the gab together with a sharp intellect that sees it like it is. Here’s a video of his which speaks to me. It’s central focus is on the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which as you may know is the first in the Bill of Rights. It’s 45 words, as Condell points out, “are among the most important ever written in the English language.”

That’s a tall claim but undeniably true. Read — no, not just read but memorize — the 1st Amendment and judge for yourself:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Continue reading “Pat Condell on “The Anti-American Dream””

Here’s a nice example of smart people saying dumb things in a momentary lapse of reason.

The dumb enters in not recognizing that what matters is the likelihood of an encounter (with a shark or a mosquito) being fatal, given that an encounter has happened. If you happen to be bitten by a shark, you are more likely to die than if you are bitten by a mosquito. But the probability of getting bitten by a shark is very low, while the probability of being bitten by a mosquito is very high. Continue reading “Mr Bill Gates, you have a call from one Mr Bayes on line 1”

My friend Prakash told me about a movement which runs cafes where the rule is pay-what-you-can. The One World Everybody Eats has “more than 60 pay-what-you-can community cafes operating in America, and over 50 others are in the planning stages in six countries.”

The deal is that you eat what’s on offer at the cafe and then pay whatever you wish. They claim that no one is turned away. They note on their website,

Healthy, dignified dining is available to everyone who walks into our cafes, including the nearly 50 million people in America who are experiencing food insecurity, utilizing social programs, and who don’t know where their next meal will come from.

Prakash wanted to know what I thought of the idea. He said that the cafes are “overall profitable.” Continue reading “One World Everybody Eats”

The simple answer to the question, “how to make medical services more affordable?”, is to remove all government-imposed barriers to entry in the medical services area. This should be a no-brainer but unfortunately it isn’t. Not just in medical services, but in every kind of human enterprise, all government-imposed barriers to entry should be discarded.

Let’s invoke a general principle, or a law if you will, of economics. All price controls are pernicious. Mandating price ceiling is bad, as are price floors. Nothing good can ever come out of it. Why? Because they create barriers to entry and exit. They impede the functioning of a free market. Just to be sure what we mean by a “free market”, it’s one in which there are no barriers to entry or exit. In free markets, all voluntary trades are mutually beneficial. In technical terms, Pareto optimal outcomes obtain in free markets. What’s Pareto optimality? It’s a situation such that you cannot make anyone better off though any intervention without making at least one person worse off. Continue reading “How to Make Medical Services More Affordable”