[Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays • By Joel Waldfogel • Princeton University Press, 2009 • 186 pages]
This little book could have been a great Christmas gift for many of your friends and relatives. It has some neat information about Christmas, and I share the author’s sense that the Christian holiday has been overly commercialized.
At the story’s end, Scrooge awakens and begins throwing money out the window. In the mind of Dickens, Scrooge has now justified his existence by abandoning the rational decision making that has made his firm successful.
From an obit for Paul Samuelson. Thanks to his work
No student would ever again rest comfortably with the 19th-century nostrum that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.
Richard Rahn is one of the few writers out there who keeps up with the underground economy and its size and scope – which is a fantastic thing to do because this is a leading indicator of the status of freedom itself. The larger the state, the larger the underground. A free society has no underground since there is no reason for people who are doing contractually licit things to hide from anyone.
Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009), first American Nobel Prize laureate (1970) has died, at the age of 94.
I was lucky to meet him at the M.I.T on the glorious day of November 9, 1989, the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the day that symbolized the end of the world system of the communist slavery.
We are all advised against speaking ill of the dead. I shall not. Paul Samuelson was a witty, humorous and very friendly and pleasant man. He was the only one I knew that rivaled Murray Rothbard in the elegance of wearing bow ties.
…is transforming “health care in India through a simple premise that works in other industries: economies of scale. By driving huge volumes, even of procedures as sophisticated, delicate and dangerous as heart surgery, Dr. Shetty has managed to drive down the cost of health care in his nation of one billion.” In the process, he and his doctors are making health care affordable to some of the poorest people in India.
Read the whole article HERE.
