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Assorted links
1. Jose Saramago starts blogging; here in Portuguese, here in Spanish.
2. The world's most expensive hotel rooms; via Craig Newmark
3. Milton Friedman YouTube video, from way back when with Milton at his peak. Black and white, and thanks to Yana for the pointer.
4. 9-minute video of Julian Simon.
5. Frank Partnoy, financial prophet.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 21, 2008 at 05:25 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
I buy into free markets, but Friedman really does come across as a propagandist. His use of terms like "do-gooder" and "Madison Avenue techniques" is so ad hominem that I can see why a lot of liberals are completely unconvinced.
Sure, government tends towards rent seeking and destruction of value. Then again, so do businesses. Every move a business makes is intended to get away from a perfectly competitive market and move towards barriers to entry, opaque information, switching costs, and all the other things that raise profits. Every firm that exceeds its cost of capital represents a market failure, however minor. Market failures are endemic to capitalism in the real world, as opposed to textbook economics. I think free market believers are often very savvy about the incentives of government, but they often _seem_ to give companies a free pass.
I guess my skepticism tends to be a little more equal-opportunity.
Posted by: Greg at Sep 21, 2008 6:30:12 PM
Always nice to see older writers such as Saramago entering the blogoshpere.
Posted by: rowdy at Sep 21, 2008 6:33:04 PM
Milton is just magical.
Posted by: Daniel Klein at Sep 21, 2008 7:33:30 PM
greg: your skepticism seems to be more founded on caricatures than equal-opportunity.
"what you are criticizing" != "capitalism"
Posted by: shawn at Sep 21, 2008 8:02:37 PM
found as a 'related video' to the friedman video linked above:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4237353244338529080&hl=en
hans rosling at TED, discussing growth across centuries throughout the world. amazing graphical representation of the growth/health of the world.
Posted by: shawn at Sep 21, 2008 8:53:18 PM
Greg,
Do what I do. Don't buy Coke at full price. Prosperity breeds choice. Choice undermines brand. For other monopolies, get the government to stop supporting them. I can think of few barriers to entry aside from happy customers that are not supported in some big or small way by some government policy. Coke's distribution makes a known commodity available wherever you go. Steve Jobs makes a business out of fixing scatterbrained technologies. He has to come up with a new winner almost every quarter. Government ham-handedness on the other hand forces bigness on us. Yes, businesses try to build a moat, and we should deny them the apparatus of government to do it in every way they find to use it (this by the way is the only thing that makes me lean toward campaign finance reform, but, alas leftists misunderstand, or understand too well, just how much the bureaucracies are special interests).
I know what you are saying, and this libertarian has put some thought into how to make tunneling under moats a viable option. Many Buffett businesses are monopolies, but many are just really good at doing business well under a respected brand. Wells Fargo, for example, so far hasn't needed bailing out. The brand has value based on financial security, as does his insurance businesses. People don't want their money to disappear. Some consumers overdo it. The problems you address, when the market is open to entry, are problems with the consumer, and I dang sure don't trust flawed consumers to enact perfect government. The first order of business is to convince the left just how counter-intuitive many of their policies are toward big corporations.
http://www.holisticpolitics.org/Corporations/
Posted by: Andrew at Sep 22, 2008 4:40:14 AM
Saramago sure can write. His first post is just a rant against Aznar and global warming skeptics, but it is probably the most eloquent rant I have ever read.
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