A German lady has lived without money for sixteen years and thinks it’s great: In the beginning, she did odd jobs around her hosts’ homes, like gardening or window washing, to earn her keep. These days, people usually don’t expect anything in return. … When seasons change, she gives away old clothing and waits for […]
McCloskey: Anyone who is not a positivist before 25 has no brain; anyone who is still a positivist after age 40 has no heart. … [Positivists promote] the tyranny of the lonely genius, seeking by contemplation in his warm room a universal system to impose upon us all.
Centives blog
Luigi Zingales: Oddly, most economists see their subject as divorced from morality. They liken themselves to physicists, who teach how atoms do behave, not how they should behave. But physicists do not teach to atoms, and atoms do not have free will. If they did, physicists would and should be concerned about how the atoms […]
Pankaj Mishra is “…the author of “Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond,” “The Romantics: A Novel” and “An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.”” He doesn’t know anything about economics or economic history and yet writes about it on Bloomberg as though he is an […]
It’s very fashionable in some circles to call for reductions in government intervention these days. Let people stand on their own two feet, we are told. An interesting article in the NYT suggests that people don’t fully understand the role of the government in providing benefits. Krugman cites US research showing that: …44 percent of […]