In my experience most professional economists go to great lenth to stress exactly the point Megan is making here. I think she's confusing "economists" with "pundits who took a few economics classes". (Or she's reading the words of real economists, but filtered through the interpretive lens of some pundit/think tank with an agenda, who either doesn't understand the economist or is deliberately distorting him/her.)
I think you'd have a hard time finding an introductory econ book that didn't stress this very point.
Paragraph 1 includes idiots like Posner.
Eh, she should have said "People who purport to be making economics-based arguments outside of the context of academic economics." Blogpost, imperfectly edited. But the rhetorical move she describes is absolutely familiar to me, and awfully common when you argue about relevant topics.
"Pareto can suck me"
Pareto: "Fine; so long as no one is worse off. Was it worse off for you?"
1 is right, but I read Megan the way Brock recommends in his revision because for some reason, I think she is an economist, or almost one (Ph.D. candidate?), and is fed up with pundits not understanding the details.
5 -- I'm pretty sure she is an engineer. Something to do with drainage and land use in the delta maybe?
I don't think she has a graduate econ degree, but at least some graduate econ classwork, possibly ABD. Yeah, she's not doing a critique from ignorance, she's objecting to an silly and common form of economic argument from a strong basis of economic knowledge. Referring to the sources of such arguments as 'Economists' was poor phrasing.
How many degrees can we confer upon Megan by comment 15?
Ok then, I wholeheartedly agree with her. You do hear that sort of argument all the time, and it's annoying as fuck. Usually spouted by some little shit who thinks anyone disagreeing with him is obviously ignorant and economically illiterate.
8 - Don't care how many comments it takes, but stop at four degrees.
BA - Env. Science
MS - Ag and Civil Engineering
MS - Ecology, policy emphasis, which is where I took the econ classes
JD
Only took me twelve years, total. No one should ever do that.
8: At least one more: doesn't she have a law degree? I think that she may be referring to the sort of people Brock mentions in #1, but I think she might be referencing economists making informal arguments. (Or, as always: "What LB said.")
And don't forget that she has a Ph.D. in Phun!
The mind reels at your student loans.
Whatever happened with the JD -- you ever practice, or did you decide not to as you were finishing up?
I never practiced, or wanted to be a lawyer. I thoughtlessly got the JD because I got into a JD/Ph.D. program and I thought that having a JD would only add one year to the Ph.D. and would make me more attractive when I was looking for professor positions. Then, second grad school was so fucking awful that I never wanted to be anywhere near acadamia again and I didn't need a Ph.D. and I left with a redundant masters and a gratuitous JD. Children (and by that I mean Teo and Ben) don't do what I have done.
The loans aren't the end of the world. It was all state schools.
That makes perfect sense. And thank you for providing fodder to be lifted so that I don't have to write my own posts.
It makes perfect sense for people who don't think ahead about what type of career would make them happy, or who don't reevaluate mid-course to decide if they should abandon their sunk costs, or to people who will trudge on through any type of misery because they have no idea how to quit things. I would want better for anyone I cared for.
(It has been a few years now, and working blogging is much better.)
Sure. But walking away from grad school is particularly the sort of thing that makes perfect sense, because my understanding is that it's incredibly hard to tell what you're getting into in academia before you're in it. The accidental JD just confused me, but now it makes sense.
And I spent all of law school wanting to snarl the bit of your post that I copied at various Law and Economics Posnerite nitwits, making me very pleased to see someone else writing it. If I weren't a married straight meat-eating unathletic New Yorker who's afraid of fun, I'd ask you out on the basis of that post alone.
It's true that economics textbooks make all the appropriate reservations in chapter 1, but then they ignore them for the rest of the book, proceeding as if Pareto-optimisation is the only thing that matters. So I don't think Megan's reference to "economists" is all that unfair.
wow, megan, reading about your educational career just reminds me that if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well.
If you don’t, you might never learn how to tell jokes properly.
If I weren't a married straight meat-eating unathletic New Yorker who's afraid of fun, I'd ask you out on the basis of that post alone.
You wouldn't have to. I've learned (hypothetically, from the Internets) that I can ask people first. And for you, I totally would.
Hah - pine all you want, LB, but Megan's so going out with Dr B & me this weekend. We'll leer at her brain for you.
12: I did `only' 10 and a bit, for three degrees. No redundant masters, but had to finish the masters before ph.d; finished the ph.d.
Ok, why am I commenting? Even though it all worked out for me and I like what I'm doing... I went into it blind and wandered my way through grad school. On the other side, and having watched it happen to friends, I finally realized how badly it *could* have gone. So even from the point of view of someone for whom it worked, I can say `kids, don't do this'. Far, far too much luck was involved.
The Black Death and 100 Years War cut the population of France roughly in half. Had its good consequences and bad consequences, not considering the dead folk, but mostly was depressing. Depending on your feelings about flagellation and Vanitas/skeleton art.
Incidentally, Megan, this is the best post evah on normal people fun vs. ultimate people fun.
People are always telling me the equivalent of #1, but they end up having to come back with something like #2. Posner is pretty high on the econ totem pole, and Becker is higher yet ("Nobel" Prize), and much crazier.
And there seems to be this tendency for the core tendency of econ to be bad (Pareto efficiency is very central for a lot of those guys) and the truth-telling adjustment to be the equivalent of fine print or chat off on the side somewhere.
Many economists are sort of OK, but Many of them are blinkered, loony, and pretty vicious. Everyone's numbers will vary.
Basil-pwned, and happy to be.
Drainage? Up here in Minnesota there's very little drainage, just marshes and lakes. It's so flat the water doesn't know which way to go.
As with so many other things, Megan should just back up her opinions on the proper form of party fun by citing a bible verse.
Well, first off, anytime you hear someone using the phrase "Pareto efficiency", "Pareto improvement", or anything similar when discussing a real-world policy, you can feel free to dismiss them right off the bat, because they're obviously full of shit. A Pareto improvement is one that makes someone better off without making anyone else worse off. These are almost never found in real-wrld policy decisions.
On the other hand, there's no doubt that there are a lot of policy changes that could improve overall efficiency, meaning (to use a cliched bit of jargon) that the gains to the gainers are bigger than the losses to the losers (in dollar terms, not necessarily in utility). Economists tend to favor such policies and not worry about the distributional effects, because redistribution of income can be done a lot more cheaply, fairly, and efficiently through the tax system (with subsidies if necessary) than through a hodgepodge of inefficient regulations.
Hilarity ensues when the same economic pundit that just sold you that bill of goods turns around and then opposes progressive taxation (and hell, all taxes whatsoever), because of its incentive dampening effects. At this point you know for sure you're talking to someone who is trying to sell you a bill of goods, not put forth a consistent and comprehensive set of policies.
Posner is not high on the econ totem pole; he's not even an economist. He's a legal academic/jurist who got a hold of a few economic textbooks and misread them. He's been hugely influential, but I think that owes a lot more to deep capture than to the quality of his thinking, honestly. Most economists I know consider his thinking shallow.
OK, but Becker is very high, extremely loony, and effectively pretty mean.
I'm always being told that the things I say about economists are a.) no longer true or b.) not true of the best economists. My feeling is still that, even though not all economists are bad, there are a lot of very bad ones out there, and that not all of the bad ones are marginal or low-ranking. And for me the real badness of bad is the arrogant proposal of politically bad policy positions on the basis of economic arguments which are not even really valid. (Notably arguments on the environment, labor, women iand the economy, social spending, and regulation.) A lot of them seem to be glib libertarians or free-market apologists.
I really loved studying economics, but I couldn't get over my objections that they were applying economic theory to stuff that wasn't an economic decision. Lots of it was stuff that should be settled based on core values, and then the economists should happily figure out economic incentives to implement it. 'Course, I also think that engineers should not be allowed to define their own problems. And that managers are useless. And that lawyers are weasels. And you guys haven't shown me what philosophers do. The more disciplines I come into contact with, the less I understand how anything ever happens.
And you guys haven't shown me what philosophers do.
Oh, I think we have.
Megan have you read Cobb and Daly's For the Common Good?
There's more to philosophy than trolley problems, mouse orgasms, brains in bottles, and cock jokes. We just happen to be specialists around here.
Sorry, Emerson, I meant to mention Becker. Yes, he's a big deal in econ, and he's a complete loony. Milton Friedman was to, although to a lessser degree. Actually, so was the whole damn "Chicago school" (which is where Posner picked up his schtick). They and their thinking somehow gained disproportionate influence (again, I blame deep capture). Although the catch is that, while big names inside the economic community (though controversial, which of course made them bigger still), they were even more influential *outside* of formal economics. And somehow word got around that they represented all that was true and right in economic thinking, even though their ideas have always been controversial among economists, and now have been nuanced away so much so that it's hard sometimes to tell the neo-Keynesians and the neo-Classicalists apart without a very good flashlight.
Although we still have a whole legion of glib libertarians and free-market apologists running around recycling simplistic (and wrong) ideas, thinking themselves sophisticated.
38 - Nope, but I just requested it from the library. I've read a bunch of stuff from the non-fiction thread, and liked a lot of it. Bissinger's A Prayer for the City was amazing. But better than all that, I am 6th on the hold list for the last Lemony Snicket book. That'll arrive at my branch any day now!
Basil Valentine and Brock Landers are entirely correct.
The economics profession's public face is pretty bad. If it's not representative, the profession should do something about it. When I see an economist opining, except for a few nice guys its usually center-right to hard right, and it's often presented with extreme arrogance and claims of scientific grounding which I think are false.
Even the nice guys (e.g., DeLong and Krugman) have oversold globalization, and shock-therapy seems to have been a criminal disaster, yet economics cruises on.
"A Pareto improvement is one that makes someone better off without making anyone else worse off. "
sure; I said that above in 4.
I mean, the context was a little different, but still, same idea.
And yet: no one took it seriously!
I've read a bunch of stuff from the non-fiction thread, and liked a lot of it.
That thread was (looks up) 1 month ago.
You have a lot more reading energy than I do.
I have been far too low on reading energy for too long.
That last line was supposed to be:
<lament>I have been far too low on reading energy for too long.</lament>
anyone-
any suggestions as to blogs worth reading?
im relatively new to this not-so-underground community of educated discussion... you see, im still a student.
At long as we're on the subject of economists:
I've read screeds from the late 70's that railed against monetarists with about the same rhetoric one now sees against laissez-faire/Chicago School/etc. My understanding is also that monetary governors in the 80's turned away from strict monetarism to a more flexible doctrine that was still very anti-inflation. Was monetarism one of the policy recommendations of the movement under discussion that was discarded along the way or something?
49: You've basically got two options: this blog, or the other ones. Either will take up about the same proportion of your time (most of it). There are pros and cons to both options; choose wisely.
"I value a thriving environment and ecosystem as much as I value human existence. If there are people, I want them happy and fulfilled and not suffering. But if forced to choose between no people and a healthy world and lots of people and a broken environment, well, I’d start looking around for a coin."
Anti-humanist! Anti-humanist!
But seriously folks, doesn't anyone find that valuation at least a bit contentious?
Sure it's contentious. I haven't seen anyone deny that.
Damnit teofilo, you aren't supposed to call out my passive-aggressive insinuations.
Since when? It's been weird around here this week.
4 was indeed very funny, but I didn't get it until I read 33.
52: sure, but there's a whole spectrum.
I know a guy who views the human race like someone wandering down the universal freeway with a `space or bust' sign hanging off them. He's convinced the best way to get there is by trashing the planet so badly we have to leave. And he'd rather we die off than not leave.
Big fan of SUV's, that one.
My high school girlfriend had a theory that trees were actually parasites on the earth, and we were helping it out by killing them off. After we finished we would die out too, and the earth would be back to normal.
Did she say anything about little men you could see if you ate shrooms, and the world ending, according to the Mayan calander, in 2012?
59 sounds like my theory about recycling. Namely, that recycling is like stealing from your grandchildren. Because landfills are the mines of the future.
That's funny, because if I were to say anything about efficiency it would be that it is both completely awesome and totally underrated. As David Schmidtz says, the impact of 1% lower annual growth over the past 100 years makes the US GDP per capita the same as Mexico's. And people aren't trying to leave Mexico for the US because the US is a better country for rich people. There is just no way of looking at economic growth (which, yes, is intrinsically connected to efficiency) as anything other than an enormous boon to humanity, especially those who aren't at the top of the economic pyramid. Empirical cases where "all the benefits go to some rich person's pockets" are, I think, slim on the ground. Globalization is emphatically not one such, as a great deal of benefit goes to poor people in 'globalized' economies. (maybe not *as much* benefit as we would like, but they are better off than they were before. Also, given that I am in a rambling parenthetical aside, let me also say that the income distribution patterns in the US are not an example of all the benefit going to the rich, even if we grant, which I do not, that over the past 5 years the living standards of the bottom 95% have stagnated. The reason for this is America is not the correct unit of analysis, and the aforementioned globalization is definitely putting pressure on growth of wealth for the bottom X% here at the same time that it elevates of the welfare of poorer people worldwide.)
Baa, what is the argument? Is it that with the lower growth you describe the US will get steadily poorer in real-dollar terms until it is as poor as Mexico is now?
Do you want to live in the Mexico-analogue of 2090 or the US-analogue of 2090?
(In this dark future, "jetbacks" from the US will fly over the wall into temperate, sunny Canada and steal all their jobs!)
43- Emerson, I think you're right about economics public face. If it helps frame things, I think this is exactly the same thing that has happened with Christianty, where right-ring whackos like Falwell and Robertson have somehow become its public face, and now that's what a lot of people think Christianity is all about. Most economists are sensible people-- I don't understand why one particular (and particularly conservative) strain of economic thinking has become so publically associated with the discipline. I suspect there are similar causitive factors in both cases, but I don't know what they are.
I suspect the Republican party played a major role.
1% lower annual growth over the past 100 years makes the US GDP per capita the same as Mexico's.
You mean one percentage point? Because real GDP growth over the last century has averaged a little over 3% annually. A 30% drop in annual growth, compounded over 100 years, would of course have a huge impact. I really don't think it's underrated. The issue is just that aggregate economic growth isn't the only relevant measure; the distribution of the growth must also be considered. And right now, it's pretty far out of whack.
Was the growth rate per-capita productivity, or total -- i.e. was failure to keep up with population growth what was being talked about?
If it's per-capita then the US will NOT revert to the present Mexican levels of poverty, but merely will fail to stay ahead of Mexico.
If the US stood still while Mexico caught up, that would be the definition of Pareto-efficiency unless envy or spite came into play, and most economists think that envy and spite are bad things and probably not important functional factors either.
On top of that economists usually talk about individual utility and are reluctant to talk about social choice or group utility. So "The US will fall behind" has the same kind of status as "The US should redistribute the wealth to attain equality" -- a lot of economists, anyway, don't recognize a general interest.
baa: that's just not true. Some of them are much worse off for their dance with globalization; see Jamaica. And since a US style economy is pretty much predicated on the existence of a `developing' world (rahter than `developed'), it doesn't scale well. Some growth is good, but blind adherence to the inept idea that all growth is good at all times isn't going to get us anywhere desireable.
33 - Sorry, I've been away. Of course it's true that Pareto efficiency has nothing to do with real-life policy decisions. Nevertheless, it is what gets studied in economics courses. There's a remarkable disconnect between economics as it is studied and what real-life economists actually do.
I don't think the Mexico comparison was about possible future outcomes, but rather a counterfactual to illustrate that what is easily perceived as a small drop in productivity can have significant economic effects. Which is true, as far as it goes, but a bit obvious in his stated example--that's not a small drop.
And I don't know about the strictly economic impact, but "envy and spite"come about when you have large income disparities. Those disparities are important and affect people's behavior, regardless of their absolute wealth. Though this isn't an argument against letting Mexico become closer to the U.S. economic level, but the opposite.
My take on economics is that it provides a useful set of tools to understand the world. Exposure to it should be limited -- it makes weak minds go completely nutso, and even in the best of worlds it's a pretty inhuman way to look at the world -- yet it provides insights that are hard to come by any other way. I personally have gotten a lot of my dabbling in economics (or at least the signs of nutsosity are sufficiently subtle that no one has picked up on them yet), and I would hate for the good it can do to be lost.
The Chicago School has the advantage of total ideological commitment. It provides a unitary world view capable of reproducing itself in new minds. The rest of economics is much fuzzier; it's harder to rally around.
There's also a strong media bias that influences the economists you hear about, as well. For example, Kenneth Arrow is at least as influential as Milton Friedman (and Friedman's influence is noticeably diminishing, while Arrow's remains steady), while Friedman is about a million times more famous outside the field. Conservatives deliberately built him up as the anti-Keynes, so much so that they regard them as dire enemies, while to economists from the perspective of 2006 the differences look pretty small. (They both admit a role for the federal government to smooth the business cycle, for example; an idea that was under sustained attack in the 80s.)
My experience today, IIRC:
1) Three political blogs interpret or misinterpret Krugman following Roubini and predict the Great Recession of 2007.
2) Three + economic blogs, like Setser and Thoma and pgl or Kash say we don't know why the dollar hasn't fallen off a cliff, supposed to happen two years ago, Friedman and Volcker both predicted it, why the holy fuck is the dollar so high mystery to us. Gee.
I still read them. Productivity sucked according to most blogs, except one. Except maybe auto production was really auto sales so it could be worse or better, maybe.
Better than basketball, since the fucking Mavs lost to SA. That's it I am thru wit em.
"it makes weak minds go completely nutso,"
Story of my intelectual life
A large number of economists are wannabe mathematician hacks. Most of the other are just plain hacks.
I'm actually very grateful for the time I spent studying econ. Got a lot from it.
But it was clear to me from the start that their pretensions to be doing science were ludicrously unfounded.
To begin with, they don't even know how to graph a function.
Come back when you remember to put the independent variable on the horizontal axis, and maybe we can talk about you being a scientist.
I don't think the Mexico comparison was about possible future outcomes, but rather a counterfactual to illustrate that what is easily perceived as a small drop in productivity can have significant economic effects.
Bingo. Growth helps people. Growth helps poor people. Not to wax polemical, but it's easy to slam growth when you are already rich, which by world standards, we all are. Whether the US growth rate is 2% or 3% is a matter of life and death -- not to us (the us of 'anglophone people in western economies with average+ IQ who can afford an internet connection and have the leisure to use it'), but to poor people in poor countries.
Bissinger's Prayer for a City was amazing.
Oh yay, it's always fun to see when somebody picks up a recommendation and likes it. It's funny; I just asked a colleague of mine to read it the other day. I had a bad moment when I realized that not only was he too young (23) to remember the book's political events, but he had not even read it in college. English departments, thou shalt become Urban Studies!
Why does the US growth rate have to be high? Is it assumed as obvious that we lead and everyone else follows?
A somewhat more generalized statement of the problem, using numbers for example, would have been appreciated by me. Apparently it's nothing but a simple lesson in compound interest. I thought there was more to it than that.
he Chicago School has the advantage of total ideological commitment. It provides a unitary world view capable of reproducing itself in new minds. The rest of economics is much fuzzier; it's harder to rally around.
I think that a lot of economists have a certain ideological belief in the absolute power of the free market in labor. I have a friend who is an economist and basically a Democrat who believes that all of the problems with public school education are caused by the teacher's unions, and he doesn't in any way acknowledge that the 19th century drop in teachers' pay could in any way be related to the feminization of the profession. "It's just an increase in the supply."
He acknowledged that economists could be sort of obnoxious. He mentioned that he was set up on a date by an economist-friend with a business organizations sociologist. At some point, the woman said, "Can't we just agree that both of these ways of looking at the world have value and that you need them both?" And he thought, no, he was a free-market economist and that was his orthodoxy.
Come back when you remember to put the independent variable on the horizontal axis, and maybe we can talk about you being a scientist.
Oh... now you're fighting dirty.
And as for the arguments made by Brock and those about Pareto efficiency, I was sure that much of the economics dealing with trade and industry issues is still from the standpoint of Pareto efficiency. The only difference is that, depending on the model you are using, the agents are different. Although some individuals may be losing out from the additional free trade (typically those who work for the wrong industries in the wrong country), their losses are not counted because the model is only examining countries as agents, and each country wins out in net. If they didn't, the trade wouldn't take place (assuming no behind-scenes coercion, of course). The problem of distributing those gains in an efficient and fair way among the consumers and producers in each country, well, that's a whole different area of research and policy, and a damn difficult one.
I really really want to act as the (other) econ apologist in this thread, but I may just fall asleep instead.
Come back when you remember to put the independent variable on the horizontal axis, and maybe we can talk about you being a scientist.
I love how you talk trash.
Deirdre McCloskey discusses the differences between economists and real scientists. She describes economists as obsessed with mathematical rigour, while scientists are more like, "first do the work, then sort the maths out later."
yeah, academic trash talk. real tough-guy stuff.
but, honestly. I took econ as a third-year chem major, and lots of us from chem and physics were doing it for distribution.
and you could look around the room and tell the scientists because we had our heads tilted at a funny angle trying to get the axes to look right. also, we didn't think the math was hard.
Whereas the econ majors thought the math was hard, and their heads
no, no, no--I should let JAC go off to bed in peace.
89: Well, I kinda agree with you on this. I can mostly get by with the constant price-quantity graphs because it seems that we're using quantity as the determinative variable nearly as often as we use price.
Since I did pure math for an undergrad, the biggest problem has been my current prof's tendency to not define terms too strictly, or write them down in nice, unambiguous mathematical expressions. Hopefully it'll get better as I go further in. I am only in my first formal econ class ever, so no one should actually care about my opinion. Everything I learned before this class was just from reading on my own.
86- JAC: the elementary, theoretical argument for free trade is about Pareto efficiency, sure. But *no* real world policy decsions (should we sign this trade agreement? lower that tarriff?) are. It's Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, at best. There are winner and losers to every decision.
And I should note that even in generic terms a sophisticated argument about free trade shouldn't mention Pareto efficiency. A free exchange is only assumed to be Pareto efficient if there are no externalities. Find me a trade agreement that won't produce externalities. I warn you though, it's going to be a long hunt.
Note that I'm one of the defenders of economics.
Economists seem to use Pareto efficiency whenever its's about social spending (taxing the rich for the sake of the poor: bad!) and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency when it's helping the well-off (or the average) at the expense of labor (e.g. trade).
Of course, trade doesn't only benefit the rich, but those who are hurt (and hurt worst) are normally labor (less well off).
Economists also deny or minimize, flatly against the basic supply and demand thinking they normally use, that either immigration or international trade have hurt labor much (one guy said "only the 2% of the population in manufacturing" and another said "only 8% lower wages, at most, for unskilled labor".)
But when it comes to minimum wage laws, they still use standard economic reasoning, in the face of empirical studies showing that apparently minimum wage laws don't reduce employment significantly.
91: You're absolutely right. I didn't even know what Kaldor-Hicks efficiency was, that's how ignorant I am on this stuff so far.
I had the wrong idea of Pareto efficiency, it really does mean that every individual is better off, with no redistribution, so you're right that virtually no trade agreements or policy issues would cause it. My first thought is that only new trade happening under constant rules really can produce something so narrowly defined.
I checked back into the thread in Megan's place, and something happened that's so epochal that it can only be expressed in Internet acronyms:
JMPP! OMG! ROFLMAO!
I don't read From the Archives except when it's linked from here -- the Objectivist chick seems to be saying she hangs out there regularly. Is that correct?
90: JAC, you did pure math for undergrad? Huh, me too. Are you sure you're not a sock-puppet? Hmm?
Oh, man. Poor JMPP. It must be so difficult living inside that head.
Really, JMPP is a regular there? If I were Megan, then, I'd need m-fun just to make it through the week.
Can't hang out for long, but 90 is exactly what I think (meeting my goal of thinking like LB for the day). Her world is so black and white.
But, it gives me lots of room to preach about judging women by their appearance.
95 - Yeah, she hangs out at my blog all the time. I think it is because I was one of the few people who wasn't tremendously rude to her during her "Quality dates quality" post. She seems to have a good deal of affection for me, in a painfully tactless and misguided way.
Little known fact I learned by reading the thread at Megan's place: if you don't have a boyfriend, you automatically lose all arguments, ever. Sucks if you're a straight man or lesbian..
Drat. You're being decent. I was going to ask if it was okay if we were rude about her here, given that it isn't your blog, but if you're going to be like that, I guess we can't.
101 - I know. The hardest part of being single isn't that I don't get enough; it is that nothing I think has any independent validity. Sucks for me..
102 - Do what you gotta do, but I mostly feel for her.
I'll post a response to her in a couple days, and then I'm sure there'll be lots of opportunities to critique her views. She will certainly defend them in the most unintentionally offensive way she can.
She's just being decent because she's chubby, and wouldn't have any friends otherwise.
This thread makes me glad I didn't read the comments to Megan's post.
Sucks for me.
That's all well and good for now, but at some point Pareto's going to get tired.
I now wish I hadn't read the comments to Megan's post.
teo, you're glad because the comments are vile or b/c JPP is making an ass of herself, and you have a low tolerance for cringe-worthy behavior?
What an ass. And not in the I-could-bounce-quarters-off-that-tight-rear sense, either.
97: Even if I had a hole large enough for you to put your hand into, I'm not sure we're that good of friends yet.
Give me a couple drinks first.
Even if I had a hole large enough for you to put your hand into
Such endearing naïvety...
Hey man, if you're going to put in one accent you might as well go all the way.
I couldn't remember if that was an accent aigu or an accent grave, and was too lazy to look up the html.
I couldn't remember if that was an accent aigu
If, in the month of dark December,
Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
If, when the wintry tempest roared,
He sped to Hero, nothing loath,
And thus of old thy current poured,
Fair Venus! how I pity both!
For me, degenerate modern wretch,
Though in the genial month of May,
My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,
And think I've done a feat today.
But since he crossed the rapid tide,
According to the doubtful story,
To woo—and—Lord knows what beside,
And swam for Love, as I for Glory;
'Twere hard to say who fared the best:
Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!
He lost his labour, I my jest;
For he was drowned, and I've the ague.
That isn't a very helpful mnemonic device, it's a bit tough to memorize.
You could just try the last bit:
and I've the ague
Now we know how to get leblanc's attention.
I was and continue to be Becks-style, so that will get my attention in those circumstances.
Actually, it should be noted that I have kind of ludicrously small hands.
So.
If anyone brings Vaseline to a Chicago meet-up, I'm high-tailing it. Or getting my horizons severely expanded.
I'm high-tailing it. Or getting my horizons severely expanded.
"Or"?
"Horizons" s/b ...
You, of all people, should know a good euphemism when you see it.
I thought that was what I was doing.
93- right, new trade under constant rules with no externalities. Since virtually all trade creates externalities, this is an empty set.
Well, I was thinking of trade between individuals, which tends to have little to no externalities (or please enlighten me if they do). But all the trade between countries and firms definitely have externality effects on their citizens and employees.
International Capitalism is fisting writ large.
There's a reason that hand is invisible.