If you ask what are total estimated reserves of some resource, and divide by the amount produced and consumed, the answer is usually about ten years or so – and has been about ten years for the last several thousand years, because people who look for resources look for resources that they intend to use in the near future, and if they find more than they can use in the near future, they forget about them or conceal them, for …
Category: economics
Famous Barbie realism
A commenter draws my attention to the Barbie book “I Can Be an Actress/I Can Be a Computer Engineer (Barbie) (Deluxe Pictureback)“, which appears to be directly and accurately based on the actual careers of real life affirmative action female engineers in the gaming industry. Barbie is off away in the the art harem, to keep her out the hair of the boys who do the actual programming. I urge those of my readers with experience in the gaming industry …
Gamergate and corruption
Gawker media’s primary audience is nerds. Their primary income comes from advertisers, who pay them to show ads to nerds. And this is what Gawker has to say about nerds. Ultimately GamerGate is reaffirming what we’ve known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission Upon receiving a hostile reaction from their audience: @hamiltonnolan @Based_Tet@max_read Max just told me I’m getting a raise because I made gamers cry And, when the advertisers did not …
Chinese growth prospects
A politically correct Harvard paper “Asiaphoria Meet Regression to the Mean” by the politically correct authors Lant Pritchett and Larry Summers tells us, or seemingly tells us, that China’s rapid growth is unlikely to last. They examine fifty or so periods of rapid growth, and, almost always, sad to say, there is regression to the mean. In the long run, the periods of rapid growth make little difference. These are, unlike your usual Harvard intellectual, genuinely smart people, and, for …
China’s real GDP passes US
For many years, US statistics have been obviously fake, understating inflation by about two and a half percent a year, thus overstating real GDP growth by about three percent a year, and understating the fall in living standards by about three percent a year. Thus, according to official statistics, US real GDP is still higher than that of China. Yet, by every measure of actual stuff and technological capability, Chinese production is substantially greater than US production, though Chinese GDP …
The Spandrellian trichotomy
Technology capitalism: libertarianism As the left gets ever lefter, it gets every crazier. Since the libertarian tries to make a separate peace with the left on behalf of capitalism, its craziness necessarily flows into libertarianism. Libertarians notice that capitalism, in particular the joint stock corporation based on double entry accounting, provides a great, humane, and highly productive system for creating wealth, advancing technological progress, and maximizing liberty. They therefore propose to accept the entire left wing program, only without its …
Why the art, literature, and science of decadent civilization is decadent
Gibbon called the art and literature of the latter days of the Roman Empire “the second childhood of human reasonâ€. Back in the days when European art was the greatest the world has ever seen, the wealthy and powerful Cornaro family patronized the artist Bernini because he was a great artist. Because high status people like the Cornaro family patronized great artists, great art was high status, and, circularly, the Cornaro family gained status by patronizing great art, such as …
The cure for IQ shredders
Our best hopes for a high tech future, for avoiding a dark age, are consuming the genes needed for a high tech future. Smart people go to Hong Kong and Singapore and fail to reproduce. Singapore has taken numerous measures, similar to those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus, to improve fertility, which will doubtless be as ineffectual as those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus. Just as the cure for Chinese poverty was to import the economic laws and …
The future belongs to those that show up
A fertility of slightly over 2.0 is a stable population.
Sarah Perry on the Economic Value of Children
Sarah Perry argues that children have been nationalized, have become property of the state and ceased to be the property of their parents, so have become a cost to their parents and a profit to the state, so parents decline to produce so many. Makes sense, certainly part of the story, but not what I seem to observe, not the main story. What I seem to see happening is that the major cost deterring people from children is not economic, …