Think Economically

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Maximum understanding, minimum average total cost.

Home is … somewhere, right?

There was an interesting sermon this week–one I didn’t expect to like–about real estate and home, and how a life is woven in there somehow. It is complicated, the intermingling between the rapidly shifting economic forces that have untethered us and our traditions; the difficulties in negotiating, or even understanding, how we should live differently with constraints lifted, how to take Polonius’s advice to “neither a borrower nor a lender be” when it seems to make so little sense to miss out on record-low interest rates.

I was reminded of Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, which is a beautiful story.

And it doesn’t make sense. The advice of past generations is not useful, sometimes. And sometimes it is. And picking apart the difference is actually super-difficult.
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Art, baseball, story and self-reference: post-modernism can’t make you more naked than naked.

So I got into a discussion this weekend about movies and television shows and books, and we were throwing stories around, by which I mean naming and recommending and panning narratives by title, and there wasn’t that much more to it, except that when you’re dropping the references to which the referents are hundreds or thousands of pages or dozens of hours as the final product of thousands of person-hours of writing and directing and costumery and millions of dollars or blood and tears invested, then the mind can reel a bit when you try to wrap your head around it.

by Zaphod

On the face of it, though, it was just a bunch of people talking about the books and movies and TV shows that they like. The idea that one could be entertained or enlightened by the exchange of references seems to be a source of some angst. It need not be a source of guilt. Postmodernism isn’t really going to destroy anything worth caring deeply about after all, except maybe its adherents’ career prospects, eventually. Read the rest of this entry »

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Economics is a science. An awesome science. Newton, Feynman, Maxwell, Hooke, et al. would agree.

I wrote this in reply to a list-serv conversation with some criticisms of economics as a  science, and since I still work for my supper, I figured in addition to making lemonade, I would clone that lemonade with the handy-dandy Replicator function on my futuristic writing contraption. The names have been changed to protect the innocent (Not very much. Einstein was changed to Galileo, and Galileo was changed to Einstein. I just switched the ‘n’s in Newton, and the same with Feynman. With Hooke it was the ‘o’s. Maxwell is not innocent, so I left his name as is.).

Enjoy!

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