Paul M. Jones

"How are 100 people supposed to skate around the arena without guidance or direction? Each skater traces out a pattern, and the patterns must mesh so skaters avoid injury. That's a complex problem. It would require smart leadership. But it won't get solved! The arena will be a scene of collision, injury, and stagnation. Who will pay for that?!"

If you knew nothing of skating, you would expect catastrophe. Before they knew of skating, people knew of dance performance such as ballet, and to achieve a complex coordination requires a choreographer. Everyone knows that.

Intuition leads us to think that complex problems require complex, deliberate solutions. In a roller rink, the social good depends on getting the patterns to mesh. But no one is minding that good. As your friend describes the business idea, not even the owner intends to look after it. How can the social good be achieved if no one is looking after it?

Yet, we have all witnessed roller skating, and we know that somehow it does work out. There are occasional accidents, but mostly people stay whole and have fun, so much so that they pay good money to participate. The spectacle is counter-intuitive. How does it happen?

via Daniel B. Klein, Rinkonomics: A Window on Spontaneous Order | Library of Economics and Liberty.

PolitiFact's decree is part of a larger journalistic trend that seeks to recast all political debates as matters of lies, misinformation and "facts," rather than differences of world view or principles. PolitiFact wants to define for everyone else what qualifies as a "fact," though in political debates the facts are often legitimately in dispute.

via Review & Outlook: PolitiFiction - WSJ.com.

Jeff Moore makes a very nice post here about Richard's passing. He is survived by his wife and daughter, among others. Please consider donating to their assistance fund.

I was first acquainted with Cyberlot by email and blog posts, and met him in person more than once at various conferences. He was always kind and congenial, and never showed any arrogance or bad attitude. He was a considerate and thorough contributor to the Solar project, and I have him to thank for the "percent-of-PHP" measurement statistic on the framework benchmarking project. I always give him credit for that in my talks, and so his name will continue live there.

And now, a practical note: A lot of PHP folk out there are freelancers or independent consultants, or are in other kinds of unstable job situations. If you are one of these, and you have a family, *please* consider purchasing term life insurance to take care of your loved ones if you pass suddenly. Get it even if you are very young. It is not expensive. It's not the only thing you should do to prepare, but it's an important thing.

At least four zero-day vulnerabilities were used. Remember, these were classified as "zero-days" once we found out about them back in June/July -- which means the folks that discovered the vulnerabilities could have been using them/testing them for 12-24 months(?) before we even knew they existed.

via Stuxnet: It's the real thing, baby | The Best Defense.

The action is not a tax cut for the middle class or the rich. It is a decision not to raise taxes.

via Tax cuts for the rich.

[I]t's certainly true that closed, secretive networks become less effective--but that doesn't mean they become less effective at the things we dislike them doing. Stalin remained exceptionally good at purges and liquidations all through World War II, and that didn't stop him from helping to win the war, and dominating half of Europe. It's just that it took more dead Russian boys to do it, because being secretive and purge-oriented kind of hampered the efficiency of the economy, leaving them a little short of key items like guns. But since Stalin was running a super-secretive, centrally controlled regime, that insight didn't really matter.

via No More Secrets - Megan McArdle - National - The Atlantic.

Prices are really useful. But in whole large sectors of the Chinese economy, particularly the banking sector, the government sets those prices. This means huge information loss, and the concomitant possibility that there is a vast misallocation of resources.

Don't those things happen in markets? Hell yes: witness the housing bubble. On the other hand, witness East Germany. To get a really catastrophic misallocation of resources, it seems to take a government; corporations can only screw things up on an artisinal scale.

Emphasis mine. Via Should China Rethink High Speed Rail? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic.

But why don’t supermarkets, restaurants, churches, apartment complexes, clothing stores, dog groomers, and other service providers in Fairfax County encounter the same problems that plague the school system? After all, the county is growing just as fast and just as unevenly for these merchants as it is for Fairfax County Public Schools. Yet we never hear that some coffee shops or department stores continue to be overcrowded while others are well under capacity. Why might this be?

via School Lessons.

The most amazing thing about the Berlin Wall is that the world didn't see it coming.

It's easy to dismiss this as hindsight bias. But at least one man - the brilliant German classical liberal Eugen Richter - saw the Wall coming over sixty years before it went up. In 1891, decades and revolutions before Orwell's Animal Farm, Richter published Pictures of the Socialist Future. It's a dystopian novel about what happens to Germany after a socialist takeover.

I just finished reading the aforementioned book; it's available as a free PDF here; it really is astounding that Richter, in 1891, was able to foresee so accurately and well. Via The Writing on the Wall, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.