Once again I’m not going to comment on the sexual abuser in chief, his tax fraud, his sex-creep pals and staffers and minions. I’m just not. Everyone else has said more and better. Consider the market for hot takes: supply has long since exceeded demand.
Twitter Commentary from Unlikely Sources
There’s social media marketing, and then there’s Steak-Umms, the discount frozen meat product, which has slowly amassed a huge following, and then exploded the other week with a lengthy disquisition on the sadness of youth, which contained only one meat pun:
why are so many young people flocking to brands on social media for love, guidance, and attention? I’ll tell you why. they’re isolated from real communities, working service jobs they hate while barely making ends meat, and are living w/ unchecked personal/mental health problems — Steak-umm (@steak_umm) September 26, 2018
And then there’s Madeline L’Engle, with some trenchant political commentary from YA fiction:
“Stay angry, little Meg,” Mrs Whatsit whispered. “You will need all your anger now.” — Madeleine L’Engle (@MadeleineLEngle) September 27, 2018
Linguistic evolution
The word “gammon,” a British term for a type of ham, has only recently become a word used to describe a certain type of angry conservative man. Popula explains the origin, along with plenty of hilarious examples.
I’m taking Economics 101 here are my hot economics takes
(Yes this is going to be a recurring section now)
One of the things I’m struggling with in my econ homework is the way terms are defined so narrowly for economics purposes, but used in a general sense with such broad definitions. When something is hard to find and expensive, I think of it as a shortage, but economics defines that situation as scarcity. A shortage is an entirely different phenomenon, caused by prices being too low to make it worth the time of producers to produce.
And of course, “welfare” and “social surplus” are all defined in ways that make sense on a chart but get very, very messy in real life, because they only make sense in a perfect market. (This is true of every discipline, I expect — Physics 101 assumes zero friction and ideal gases, Chemistry 101 assumes reactions are always complete, Biology 101 assumes Mendel’s phenotype charts are close enough to accurate for now). In this perfect market, buyers and sellers make the choice to buy or sell based on how much they value a given product. This creates the maximum social surplus, in which buyers get what they want (products) and sellers get what they want (money). This works very well when there are plenty of sellers, plenty of buyers, everyone’s well informed, everyone knows what they want and how much they want it, and anyone can choose to exit the market or choose substitute products if they don’t like the deal. That, of course, almost never happens in the real world.
My first paper for class contrasts this fictional ideal market with the market for wheat in Ireland in 1845, and the market for insulin in the US today, something I’ve covered in this newsletter before. The economics textbook way of describing the famine was that blight caused a reduction in supply of potatoes (not a shortage, that’s different). This increased demand for a substitute, wheat. The English clearly valued wheat more than the Irish, since they paid more for it. Irish consumers then exited the market for wheat by emigrating or simply starving to death. This is, clearly, not the market distribution of goods envisioned when students chart the market for bottled water or iPhones.
My textbook insists that economics is not normative — that economics as we study it is purely a descriptive effort. We do not decide whether it is good to have a minimum wage or a government redistribution or price support. We describe the effects. It just so happens that the effects we model in our charts aren’t quite the ones that happen in real life. The answer, of course, is that three weeks of an introductory economics course isn’t nearly enough understanding to set global economic policy. (Sadly, that’s a good deal more than most policymakers will ever have…)
See also
If “the economy” is doing so well, how come American workers aren’t better off?
Cultivating joy
Send bread do not ask why
Kitten visits puppy.
Capybara and bunny.
Secretly Ironic 