Exactly!
Andrew Klavan ·
Dec 3, 2010 at 8:23am
Cute girl with dynamite eyes and unpronounceable name explains why Keynesian economics is absurd. Five minutes long and very much worth watching for the liberal arts majors among us, like myself. Hat tip to Instapundit:
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Dec '10
Re: Exactly!
I don't remember any eyes that cute in my almost entirely all-male Econ courses in college. It's been five years since I graduated and I'd be willing to go back if it meant being taught by her!
All chauvinism aside, what a wonderfully ascertainable explanation of things the media (and English teachers at most public high schools) go out of their way to confuse young people in this country about.
We learn liberalism from liberals growing up...but we also learn conservatism from liberals. This needs to change.
Jun '10
Re: Exactly!
The problem with borrowing from the Future, over and over, is that one day the Future will show up on your doorstep to collect. "Future" will be bigger than Brock Lesnar, love causing pain, and have absolutely no patience or sense of humor. From there, life goes downhill fast.
Aug '10
Re: Exactly!
You can follow Ms. Alaghebandian at her twitter account here. Her recent tweets include a Jonah Goldberg retweet and an article by Steven Hayward. She also thinks that Iron Man 2 was a good libertarian movie. With regard to the opening scene at least, I couldn't agree more.
Nov '10
Re: Exactly!
Andrew, Thanks for this one. Very good! After looking at it, one of the other videos that caught my eye was something from 30 years ago. Milton Friedman is a guest on Phil Donahue. He does a marvelous job of breaking things down for the common person. It's also interesting to see the timelessness of the principles. I chuckled when Chrysler and Sears and the airlines are brought up. I highly recommend!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE1nJJBoxvk&feature=related
Re: Exactly!
My 13 year old daughter is taking a very difficult required course focusing only on developing nations. She is learning all about GDP and GDI. I'm going to be sure to show her this. Of course she's already wells school on the sin of high taxation. Every time she buys something (with her own money, not ours) she curses the nearly 10% sales tax we Californians pay and says if she didn't have to pay it, she could buy 10% more stuff and wouldn't that create more jobs for people?
Nov '10
Re: Exactly!
It's off topic, but do any of you experts in economics know what the term "rent-seeking" means? It has something to do with when a nation has a wealth of natural resources, I think, but I don't quite understand it.
Nov '10
Re: Exactly!
It is economic gain via means other than productive output. The term is sourced in the fact that land owners seek "rent" from the productive output of tenant farmers(historical context). It has a far more pejorative sense today in that current "rent seekers" are not renting out their capital (i.e. the land) but rather seeks rents (profits) through monopoly or regulatory privilege. In a sense many public sector employees are rent seekers. Probably the purest example is an IRS agent.
Edited on Dec 3, 2010 at 5:00pmMay '10
Re: Exactly!
I saw this clip linked at Cato earlier in the week - the format's a little dry, but hey, it's economics! After the Ricochet team convinces the big papers and networks to cover econ issues with 1/10th of Ms. Alaghebandian's intelligence, we should figure out a way to get her to date me.
Sadly, I think the second task would be less impossible than the first.
Aug '10
Re: Exactly!
Rent-seeking doesn't just pop up over natural resources, but all over the place. Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start reading about what it means.
Very roughly, rent-seeking is finding a way to be rewarded for unproductive behavior.
An example is growing wealthy not by providing better goods or services, but by getting the laws rewritten to harm your competition.
I do not think, however, that if you inadvertently profit from laws that harm others, that you must be labeled a rent-seeker. I think the term is reserved more for deliberate behavior. (But I'm not sure.)
Jul '10
Re: Exactly!
Loved the video. The one image that would hammer the point home that is missing from the video is that the focus should not be on changing the allocation of the pie, but changing the size of the pie.