http://emergentorder.com/blog Intermittent perambulations Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:35:38 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Studying ant behavior to gain insights into emergent order isn't exactly a new idea, but it's nice to see some ongoing work that might have practical implications in the relatively near term: Ants can teach us how to beat city congestion, claim scientists: [Dr Dirk Helbing, et al] set up an ... http://emergentorder.com/blog/2008/11/08/ants-and-traffic/ Brad Schiller had a well-reasoned piece in the WSJ on the "Inequality Myth". It's a good read, but I'm going to pick a nit or two. Schiller hints at the rhetorical sleight-of-hand that politicians use to stir the class-warfare pot: Both candidates portray America as a nation where the fruits of economic ... http://emergentorder.com/blog/2008/03/11/production-is-not-consumption/ From The Stalwart's review of Bernd Heinrich's Bumblebee Economics: ... a species can be conceived as a firm that's grown to specialize in tapping certain energy reserves throughout nature. In the case of bumblebees, one could think of them as a hedge fund that specializes in micro-arbitrage opportunities -- available ... http://emergentorder.com/blog/2007/06/23/for-the-reading-list/ An argument for retail health care by Michael Goodfellow, by way of Marginal Revolution. Following an overview of the factors that actually influence life expectancy, he writes: There's no reason to insure yourself against the ordinary expenses. We do that now, and just end up paying for it in premiums instead ... http://emergentorder.com/blog/2007/06/22/retail-health-care/ Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of the excellent Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, and more recently The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which I've not read yet) discusses what he is optimistic about: The Birth of Stochastic Science. He ... http://emergentorder.com/blog/2007/06/19/encouraging-accidents/ This month's Reason has an interesting interview with Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, noting the influence of Hayek's ideas on spontaneous order. Wales' latest venture, Wikia, is a service that allows users to set up their own wiki communities. The rules (or lack thereof) appear to be roughly the same as those ... http://emergentorder.com/blog/2007/06/17/wales-on-wikipedia-and-hayek/ Ludwig Lachmann, discussing the problem of diminishing returns in Capital and Its Structure, makes the following argument: Where existing capital is merely duplicated ('widened'), operated by a given labour force, diminishing returns will soon appear. Where new capital resources, but of the type employed before, are being substituted for labour ('deepened'), ... http://emergentorder.com/blog/2007/05/04/innovations-wide-deep-and-long/ There’s an interesting discussion at Overcoming Bias about a study that finds no significant different between outcomes (under specific circumstances) of patients treated by more expensive doctors and those treated by less expensive nurse practitioners. In the case of practically any other human endeavor, a throng of enterprising individuals would jump ... http://emergentorder.com/blog/2007/04/29/primary-care-arbitrage/ In an earlier post (Peer-Production and the Extent of the Market), I had suggested that perhaps peer-production efforts did not necessarily represent a non-market phenomena, but may instead represent an adaptation to insufficient market extent. A weakness in that argument is the fact that market size is clearly not an ... http://emergentorder.com/blog/2007/04/28/market-extent-and-self-selection/ A recent WallStrip piece on AutoZone mentioned that the company is counting on the increase in minimum wage to drive teen spending on shiny things. One expects politicians to live in the sort of fantasy world where wealth is created by the magic of legislative fiat. It is more disturbing ... http://emergentorder.com/blog/2007/03/15/paychecks-to-be-signed-by-tooth-fairy-delivered-by-loch-ness-monster/