Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Leonard Richardson on the economics of giving books away, and on James Ledbetter's experience with the website and book gifting market.

"The solution is refrigeration."

Without the [helmet] rule, the players’ individually rational decisions added up to a collectively irrational result. With the rule, the outcome was closer to what players really wanted.

As Michael Moore's Sicko repeatedly demonstrates, health insurance firms often behave appallingly. But it isn’t because they are staffed entirely by evil people. This is a structural problem.

In other words, China is no different than other companies, as they need to follow the same economic rules everybody else does to grown into a well-developed economy and political culture. Also interesting to note that he accepts official estimates of Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Tim Wu writes the article I tried writing: we're substituting one theory of everything (bell curve) with another.

"Game theory, applied to the problem of penalties, says that if the striker and the keeper are behaving optimally, neither will have a predictable strategy."

He's referring to opportunity costs, that is, what you forego if you would have taken an alternative action.

I wonder what Thomas Sowell has to say about the non-performing loans to state industries.