Some treasure hunters in the UK have found £6m worth of Norman era Silver coins.
In the day they would have bought 500 sheep. So we’re told.
Doing the maths, today they’d buy 30,000 sheep.
So either Silver had appreciated at 6% per annum over the last 1000 years, or sheep have depreciated at a much greater rate.
My money is on the sheep.
On matters of complexity, I generally defer to simplicity.
Portmonteau is a portmonteau!
Clams got legs!
Before (facsimile)
After
Murder Weapon
Motive
Memorial
I can’t help but feel like economists are far too kinetic in their thinking. They simply don’t understand thermodynamics as the driving forces behind economics.For example, they get to radical uncertainty, and throw their hands up!And yet, we know that, without input of energy by us humans, that all systems (including economic ones) tend to disorganization. This is known as entropy.The only way that a system resists the pull of entropy is by the input of energy. In economic systems this energy is human ingenuity and effort. This is true even for those systems that appear to resist forecastability due to the presence of radical uncertainty.
How can one improve productivity in a services economy? It’s oxymoronic to think it can be done.
Our services economy only works to create artificial jobs in order to spread out the wealth and consumption, thus keeping the whole thing afloat.
When politicians start talking about improving productivity they mean lowering wages.
In a service economy this will result in less spending, and it becomes a downward spiral.
Great for the environment I guess.
I do think that heuristics are best learned from one’s mistakes, especially in complicated areas of human activity like business that involve radical uncertainty.
Which in turn explains why apprenticeships are more useful than degrees in training people in these areas. So, no, we don’t need MBA’s for startup executives.
Now I have to ponder why heuristics are best learned from mistakes. I think mistakes and the associated pain hard-wires into us an inability to override the heuristics.
Which is another way of saying that it’s very common to use rational thinking to override heuristics. That’s because humans underestimate the reach of radical uncertainty.
What the priest said to the politician.”Sometimes doing what you’re good at isn’t a good idea”
I do not believe in any beliefs because I cannot attach myself to concepts that aren’t supported with even a little data.However I happen know (because of a lot of data) that most people (apart from me) do have beliefs. Oodles of them, in fact.This makes me odd, to say the least.
Everyone sits somewhere on this scale, whether they agree to or not:
Bogan<<=========>>Wanker
The whole bloody country.
Me, I’m about 60:40. And I can scurry up and down the scale as circumstances require. Those over 80, at either end, they can’t scurry.
Oooh, the English Private Equity boys are going to have a field day.
A toy hermit crab, with legs that move. Sideways.
The very best thing that we can do to save our environment to ensure that it is conducive to our continued existence is to stop consuming in excess of equilibrium.To stop consuming we will need to dismantle all the gains of enlightenment; namely technology and trade and probably also democracy.
Which is to say, the relief of man’s estate was only possible by the injury to the environment.
It’s the paradox of the ages; we simply aren’t smart enough to unravel this puzzle.
I reckon if you plotted (over a century or two) the relationship between average family size (no of kids) versus the rise of mental illness (depression and anxiety) you’d find a pretty good correlation. My view is that with less kids, we become more focused on their individual well-being, hence they are are at the centre of their own universes, then they get more disappointed with reality as they get older as it becomes obvious that they are not really at the centre of anyone else’s universe (outside of their parents).
offshore westerly 