What's the value to society of company stability?

I understand clearly why you as an investor want to use diversification to stabilize a stock portfolio (that spans multiple companies). But who benefits from having one particular company be stable and secure? Risk-averse investors? Don't they buy bonds or ultra-stable, ultra-diversified portfolios anyways?

Real geeks implement their own custom version of vim in elisp!

This post are spel-cheecked by Sony.

Now that you speak of reproduction rates, here's a thing that's bugging me:

What does that mean? Doubling sounds like a lot, but consider this:

It's about a 3.5% yearly growth. Your bank balance can probably do that with a reasonably diversified portfolio, at least if you can afford parking your money for a few years.

Throughout the same past 20 years (1990-2010), the US economy has grown from 8 to 13 times X dollars (http://www.supportingevidence.com/Government/US_GDP_over_time.html), or put another way by 50% and then some. The US population in general has grown by roughly 25% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States).

So yeah, it's fast, but's it's 3.5% vs. 2% and 1% if you put it in those terms. (@editors) Let's have some context, yes?

Suppose that out of every ten religious-gene children, seven become religious themselves (let's say, in five different religions); out of ten atheist-gene children, only six become religious. Then, this version of reality is consistent with your experince *and* with the headline+summary (I don't RTFA, the comments have more signal per time).

That's one issue: when you do any observation of complex systems, such as humans or groups of humans, you don't just look at a single data point. You look at two different points, and try to link the difference in outputs (kid religiousity) to the difference in inputs (parent religiousity).

Another issue: humans are complicated systems. Groups of humans even more so. Therefore, if you look at only one point of each type, you might get fooled by an arbitrary difference that's due to some unrelated factor. That's why you make a lot of observations, hoping that the unrelated variations distribute themselves evenly, such that the "sum of error vectors" is zero (or exponentially small) in both groups of subjects.

So even if your anecdote ran counter to the theory, you would need an overweight of similar anecdotes versus the ones confirming the theory, and the anecdotes would have to be chosen randomly in order for the assumption "the error vector sum is small" to make sense.

(At least as far as I understand science and statistics. If I'm wrong, please tell me: help me inform rather than misinform people in the future.)

No, of course he couldn't. Technical solutions to social problems never work.

Besides, he'd be conditioned into associating the screen images of CoD with the inane messaging on the chat, so his subconscious would expose him to the thing he was trying to suppress

I agree; not just safety nets, but progressive transfers, regulation to completely internalize externalities (pollution for one). Quoting myself,

Note also I advocate land value taxation and (parts of) Georgeism; I'm told he was a strong workers' rights advocate, so I'm not pro big business or pro the rich people.

All that is to say: I have an issue with you saying that the thing I defend is a cult. I believe markets generally do well, based on the arguments economists use, and I assume that observational data and empiricism enters into those arguments and/or the validation of them. According to my limited understanding of how markets work, doing medicine on the market ought to work fine, but in practice socialised medicine appears to work best. Maybe the incentives are wrong or maybe the consumers are irrational or something, I'm not sure. But I'm pro socialised medicine because evidence says it works. I don't think a market cultist would be.

I think you mean 65. Godwin agrees.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst-social-mobility

Top 3 of least social mobility (~= meritocracy): UK, Italy, US
Top 3 of most social mobility: Denmark*, Australia, Norway (* I live here)

You have been told the American Dream, I take it? Then again, "non-OECD countries" is a good approximation of "most other countries", so I guess I agree, but I would encourage you and your readers to put that statement in perspective.

Also, I suspect the opportunities for relative social mobility give people an incentive to do the things that create a rising tide of upward absolute mobility for all boats, which makes a country rich and an OECD country. (So what I'm saying: there's a selection bias due to a correlation the other way when only comparing against rich/OECD countries).

Personal liberty, private property and well-functioning competitive markets (with internalized externalities) seems to be a good way to create a prosperous, mobile and fair society. What could stand in the way?

For one, if you're rich, after paying taxes and life's necessities (and maybe conveniencies and amusements) you often have money by which you can earn more money, and more so than the poor.

Also, taxes and other government fiddling might be regressive. Milton Friedman points to some progressive-intended regressive transfers in Free To Choose; you can watch clips on youtube (GIYF). His negative income tax is guaranteed to be regressive.

Thirdly, you might have exclusivity deals, monopolies, externalities and government corruption/bribery/lobbying. This will tend to favor special interests (especially those too big to fail) at the expense of "the rest of us". Also, you might have heritable special priviledges.

I agree with you: progressive transfers are a good thing, especially if you're a utilitarian---grep "Daniel Kahnemann" ted.com for a presentation of why.

I'm not one to defend libertarians---I by and large disagree with their views---but I think you misrepresent them. Or at least you don't represent the narrow subset I know of. Which is mostly through podcasting: Brett Veinotte (School Sucks), Wes Bertrand (Complete Liberty), Stephanie Murphy and Mike something (Porc Therapy) and Stephan Molineux (Free Domain Radio).

Their viewpoint is one of deontological morals: the moral value of an action is determined by the action itself, not its eventual outcome. Furthermore, what is moral is private property and non-agression: you're free to do whatever you please as long as you leave other people and their stuff alone. This is an argument against taxation, which they like to describe as the involuntary extraction of money by force or threat of force. They tend to be market-oriented and believe that free markets don't have problems, or that their problems are better than the problems of the state.

I think the state does something wrong (see exclusivity deals above), but free markets and private property has problems in itself as well: if land is a fixed-supply resource and increasing population means increasing demand, you can speculate in land (buy now, sell later) and extract money by renting it out to a landless population. I think the fix is land value taxation: turn the value of the rent into public property. If you're inclined towards math and economics, see also the Henry George theorem.

Congratulations! You win a free* course in introductory microeconomics, at http://www.econtalk.org/ and/or http://www.youtube.com/user/jodiecongirl#p/c/22785443C5FB0F83

(* Your labor opportunity cost will not be compensated.)

That's the sarcastic way of saying I disagree: while it may be the sellers that paint the price sign and hang it up where buyers see it, they choose the price as a function of their customers' and potential customers' collective ability and willingness to pay (or they lose the price competition and close up their shops).

Interesting. My bullshit detector recipe lists a somewhat different bundle of ingredients:

- Formal logic and proofs, as seen through the lens of mathematics. Knowledge of the most commonly used types of invalid or illogical arguments.

- An understanding of statistics and how not to get lied to with data. Remember to compare against baselines, compute conditional probabilities the right way around. Beware of selection biases.

- Philosophy of science and epistemology: we can know stuff through our senses and through experiments. An appreciation of the effect of science on society.

- Psychology: the biases of human cognition, memory, intuition and emotion. The reason we double-blind those scientific studies that deal with humans. Confirmation bias, selective memory.

- Economics and political science: having an understanding of which unintended consequences (misguided) policies might have. Having an understanding how what the left hand is doing affects what happens in the right hand. The seen and the unseen, and the use of knowledge in society.

It seems my bullshit detector leans more towards the natural and social sciences, but maybe I'm biased towards that end of the spectrum. I can see how history and economics interrelate, though, and philosophy includes philosophy of science and moral philosophy which is touched upon by economics---you can't evaluate an economic policy without a yardstick, and economic yardsticks are made out of moral philosophy.

The government could also not take the money in the first place, and then the people could themselves spend it on what makes them happy. If economic theory is worth anything, that will tend to make people better off, as they can always make the same choices the government would have made for them.

How so?

I get history (especially when related to economics). Care to explain how language makes people better citizens? What is a good vs. bad citizen?

There seems to be a great market for education in the liberal arts. However, there doesn't seem to be a great market for liberal arts graduates, except as unskilled labor. As I would expect---are you willing to pay a premium on your groceries if the cashier knows 16th century french legal philosophy? Why/why not?

I'll give rethinking my position a fair shake if you'll help me rethink it.

As you have used the term, what are the liberal arts? What is the societal use of people being well versed in the liberal arts? What is the social use of people getting degrees in the liberal arts?

I think it's called mplayer :)

News flash: economists have discovered a new concept called "production", whereby raw materials are turned into goods. ;-)

Sure, demanding payment, i.e. saying "you will give me money for this", is covered by freedom of speech. What's really at stake (and I think we agree about everything except the framing) is the right to not disclose ideas, and the right to enter into contracts.