Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Jump Cuts

Learn 'em. Love 'em. Live 'em.

See? That's not so hard, yeah?

I didn't read the entire screed, though I skimmed all the way to the end. I think economics is more properly limited to those things in which it is possible to at least approximate a quantifiable value. No doubt you're correct about all the trade-offs involved in the ways we spend our time and the values placed on the various aspects of our lives, but calling the choice to go to church on a Sunday morning instead of prepping for football an economic choice will never be persuasive to me. What's the difference in dollars and cents? If you can't quantify that choice, then I think there will be a better, more accurate descriptor than "economics". It's useful, but it's not a theory of everything. Pascal's wager is about as close as I like to get in that regard.
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6 comments:

  1. weblogbob83May 31, 2011 at 2:11 PM

    I confess I don't get the reference. "Jump cuts"?

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  2. weblogbob83May 31, 2011 at 2:13 PM

    Does it mean making it so your whole blog post is on a link instead of taking up valuable real estate on the home page? I confess I don't know how to do that.

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  3. weblogbob83May 31, 2011 at 2:22 PM

    And once more, because I don't want to keep using the home page to discuss this, but the point of opening up the term "economics" is largely due to the inability of an economist to assign a value in dollars and cents to something, because of subjective value and marginal utility. Read the footnote. How much is an apple worth? Which apple is it, ordinally? So the fifth apple we acquire is the fifth most valuable apple to us. The store can (and does) assign a particular price to each apple (or each bag of apples, or what have you), but the value of those apples cannot be quantified in dollars and cents, because if the price were an objective, quantifiable value of the apple, the store would not prefer to have the money rather than the apple, and the customer would not prefer to have the apple than the money, and the wholeselling is right out.

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  4. weblogbob83May 31, 2011 at 11:30 PM

    I still don't even know where to begin learning how to do that. Do I have to edit HTML by hand? Because I'm not really interested in learning how to do that.

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  5. KJune 1, 2011 at 3:39 AM

    There's a button the bar above the posting window.

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  6. weblogbob83June 2, 2011 at 3:32 PM

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

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