Sunday Sermonette: Moar Anachronism
Psalms 79 and 80 are attributed to Asaph. As you will recall, Asaph was purportedly one of David ' s chief musicians, but the setting of these psalms is evidently the fall of Judah to Babylon, so that makes no sense. These must have been written during the exile, after Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem and kidnapped the elites. It ' s also possible, though less likely, that the setting is the sack of Jerusalem by the Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak in the 10th Century BCE, in the reign of Rehoboam, but Asaph, if he ever existed, would certainly have been long dead by then. In general, most of the psalms seem to be responses to even...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 17, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Distributive justice
One last point about Economics 101 may be the most important, is likely to be overlooked or even denied in the U.S. today. Economists claim they can show that if all their assumptions are true – perfect information, willing sellers and willing buyers, perfect competition, no externalities – the hypothetical free market will create what is called a Pareto optimum. That is a situation in which no person can be made better off without making someone else worse off. This is the basis of t he claim that the free market allocates resources “efficiently.” But there can be a Pareto optimum in which everybody has an equal o...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 16, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Goodness!
The essential, first-order or pure concept of " public goods " is whatever we benefit from that is " non-excludable " and " non-rivalrous. " That means you can use it without paying for it, and if you use it, it ' s still there for others. An example, at least for the time being, is the oxygen in the air. Back in the good old paleolithic, there was a lot more of that. Basically, the land and the water and the plants and animals were there for the taking, and there was usually plenty so rivalry was uncommon. Of course, this only worked within your own tribe -- sometimes people of different tribes tried exclusion and rivalry...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 14, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
History Lesson
Psalm 78 is, I believe, the third longest psalm. It ' s also one of three so-called " long history " psalms. It basically recounts events from Exodus and Numbers, in chronologically confused order, and then skips ahead to touch on the establishment of the reign of David. The listing of the plagues of Egypt does not exactly correspond to the canonical version of Exodus we have today -- there are no caterpillars or frost in Exodus. This may just be a fanciful addition, or it may be that it draws on a lost version of the story. Once again, keep in mind that there were no printing presses and any document would have existed in...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 13, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The worst assumption of all
Before getting back to Econ 101, I won ' t keep you in suspense. Aaliyah Edwards didn ' t play yesterday, so Auriemma had only 7 players suited up, which meant that Ice Brady had to play 40 minutes. The most minutes she has played in any game previously is 14. Ashlyn Shade also played 40 minutes, while Bueckers and Muhl played the entire game until Geno pulled them in garbage time. No problem. Marquette scored zero points in the last 14 minutes of the game, which means the box score shows a bagel for the fourth quarter. UCONN won 58-29. Apparently there ' s precedent for zero points in a quarter in women ' s college ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 11, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
The Dark Web?
Norton Utilities is a good product, but they relentlessly try to upsell you. The latest trick is to tell me that data brokers trying to sell my data, and I should pay them to expunge it. The data in question consists of my name, address and telephone number -- actually two numbers, both of which are more than twelve years old. Finally, it includes my purported relatives, which consist of my dead mother, a guy who lives across the street to whom I am unrelated, and three people I never heard of. When I was a youth, and actually until about 15 years ago, the Post Office used to deliver a book to every household in town,...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 10, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
But I digress
The UCONN women ' s basketball team has been short-handed all season because five players are out with season-ending injuries. So they ' ve lot some game to the top teams but they ' ve still managed to be undefeated in Big East conference play. Yesterday they faced Providence College in the second round of the Big East tournament. PC ' s strategy was to beat the crap out of UCONN center Aaliyah Edwards, which the referees for some reason allowed them to do, causing Geno Auriemma nearly to have a stroke on sideline. The assistant coaches had to put him in a double arm bar to keep him off the court.Providence managed to hang...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 10, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Monopoly Money
First, let me acknowledge Chuck ' s comment on the previous Economics 101 post. I ' m going to get to public goods, it ' s extremely important, but I figured I ' d push it down the list because it ' s easier to deal with the rest of the assumptions first. (To put it formally, the ones having to do with public goods are that all good are non-exclusive and non-rivalrous, and also that there are no positive externalities. I will explain anon.)Today, I ' m going to deal with the Many sellers, Many buyers assumption. It ' s obviously impossible even for Milton Friedman to bamboozle people into thinking that this is somehow a na...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 8, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: God is bad(ass)
Psalms 75 and 76 are classified as songs of praise, but what they are praising is not goodness or wisdom, but sheer power. And they use some weird metaphors. Psalm 75 appears to refer to a day of judgment, an idea which appears rather vaguely in the Tanakh but which is more central to Christianity. Note that the idea in Judaism of the coming of the Messiah and restoration of the kingdom is quite different. However, they have become conflated in the current political alliance between fundamentalist Jews and Evangelical Christians. One of the other would be really disappointed should it ever come to pass. (Again, " Do Not De...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 6, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
What do you know?
The next assumption on our list, on which the theory of the (non-existent) Free Market ™ depends, is the assumption of perfect information. Okay, it doesn ' t have to be absolutely perfect, but it has to at least be pretty good. In order for a transaction to really benefit both parties, they both have to know what they ' re getting and what they ' re giving for it. Once we ' re off the island of Bob and Alice, of course, what ' s normally happening is that one person is exchanging money for a good or service, so the transaction is asymmetrical pretty much by definition -- there ' s a seller and a buyer.Most people don ' ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 5, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The dark book
As I explained last time, the Book of Psalms is a compilation and Psalm 72 is evidently the conclusion of one of the component books. The next ten are attributed to Asaph, who was one of king David ' s chief musicians, but that doesn ' t really make sense because they seem to refer to a time when the kingdom was in dire straits, quite unlike the triumphalist tone of the depiction of David ' s reign. Psalm 73, which is used in both Jewish and Christian liturgy and has been set to music, asserts continued faith even while the wicked prosper. The psalm predicts the downfall of the wicked, although as we know that doesn ' t ne...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 3, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Irrationality
One assumption that economic theorists have been weirdly fond of is the idea that as consumers, and investors, people are " rational actors. " We ' ll put the investor aside for the time being and just consider ourselves as consumers -- people who buy stuff with money. (We also consume a lot that we don ' t pay for but that ' s for another day.) The idea of rationality in this context means, first of all, that our desires for goods and services that might be on sale are quantifiable in units called utiles, an idea which has always been kind of vague, but basically it means that I can say that three tomatoes right now ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 2, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Divine Right
Psalm 72 is one of those elevating the king to a kind of demigod status and extolling his power and glory. As I have said many times, the basic structure of Judean society, as was the norm throughout the region, was an alliance between a priestly caste and warrior kings, so that ' s what this is all about. But yes, it ' s weird that it ' s called a Psalm of Solomon, and concludes with " The prayers of David, son of Jesse, are ended. " It ' s doubly weird because many subsequent psalms are in fact ascribed to David. The likely explanation is that the Book of Psalms we have today is a compilation of several books, usually th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 28, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Assume a Can Opener
Conclusion . . . The
endeavor from here on is to inflate this into a claim about the real world of
many people, many corporations, and innumerable products.A
first order conclusion is that the way to the best possible world is to let
everybody do whatever trading they want, of anything, with anybody.The
posited “free market” economy, if left to its own devices, will turn out
maximum prosperity, efficiency and happiness for all.Government
just needs to leave it alone – an idea called laissez faire – French for “let
do” – a phrase popularized in the 19th
Century. This, however, depends on certai...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 27, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Economics 101, Lesson One
One
way you can create jobs is to lower people ' s taxes. If people have more money
to spend, it means somebody has got to produce more for them. And the producers
then need to hire people. It ' s Economics 101! -- George W. Bush, Springfield, MO,
January 14, 2002*Mr. Bush was very fond of saying " It ' s Economics 101! " It was a catch phrase for him, and other politicians often say it. But can you think of a critique of the above statement? Is there anything wrong about it?(Jeopardy! music plays.) Okay. When government acquiresrevenue from taxes, what happens to the money? Does it just disappear? Why no.T...
Source: Stayin' Alive - February 26, 2024 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
