Markets In Not Quite Everything: Jane Austen Edition

...when a budding author sent typed chapters of Jane Austen’s novels to 18 [publishers], changing just the titles and characters’ names, only one recognised her words.
Another managed to recognise they were ‘a really original read’. But the rest simply rejected them or never responded, according to the man who posted the manuscripts, David Lassman.
“It was unbelievable,” he said.

How Many Traders Can You Fit into a Model?

A good acid test of the usefulness of an economic theory, writes Juliusz Jablecki, consists in a careful examination of its assumptions. If they are manifestly absurd, unrealistic, or even unrealizable — like the assumption of a continuum of traders or goods in the economy — then such a theory has nothing important to say about the way things really are, and should be treated as the joke it actually is. Mainstream economists, in their search for generality and a somewhat irritating “pretence of knowledge,” deal almost exclusively with infinities - a dangerous and counterproductive notion to use in economics.

The Peculiar History of Arthurdale

During the 1930s, the wish of the world’s politicians to “plan” other men’s lives was strong and, by unhappy coincidence, so was their power to do so. The urge to “educate and uplift” their fellow (if lesser) man into a state more agreeable to their theories beat brightly in every progressive heart from Moscow and Berlin to London and Washington D.C. As a result, the city of Magadan in Russia’s Siberia was built from nothing, by and for Stalin’s slave army. It still exists today. In Germany, the town of Ramersdorf was built from scratch on the magnanimous whim of Adolph Hitler; it too still exists today. And America’s very own example of the fad was the West Virginia town of Arthurdale, constructed during 1933 on the magnanimous whim of Eleanor Roosevelt.

How the Shrimp Tariff Backfired

Entrepreneurs are not easily thwarted by government intervention, writes Don Mathews. Sometimes entrepreneurs respond so creatively that they render the interventionist measure almost meaningless. A classic example of an entrepreneurial response to state-sponsored plunder is the case of the US anti-dumping tariff on imported shrimp. Total shrimp imports to the United States have increased by 14 percent since the tariff was imposed, while domestic shrimp prices have decreased by 9 percent. Also, US shrimp imports from the six countries targeted by the tariff have increased by almost 20 percent since the tariff was imposed.

Why Government Can’t Make Decisions Rationally

Ben O’Neill examines the difference between private and public decision making. Government solicits the views of the relevant “stakeholders,” identified by the bureaucracy. Who are these stakeholders? Why, they are the people and groups that have a stake in the decision of course. And when we say “a stake,” we must be a little selective. After all, government spending is paid for, at least in part, by the myriad of taxes that are stolen from virtually every person in the population. And since we do not wish to take a complete census of the population, we must therefore limit ourselves to only some stakeholders, or more precisely, to those stakeholders who have the biggest stake in the decision.

Nationalizing the Wine Industry

Since we know the monstrosities associated with government buildings, monuments, and state-built cars, surely then, we can imagine a Europe with a nationalized wine industry. Don’t laugh; the European Union’s top agricultural official is wanting to do just that. EU Farm Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel thinks that the state can spend money and market Europe’s wine “more efficiently” than the private producers.

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