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.
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.
Milton is just magical.
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.
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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