I was reading my RSS feeds tonight, when I stumbled on this article. I remember discussing this concept of cycles of history with both my mom, and my brother-in-law. Jame’s Delong’s description of the “Special Interest State” I think fits our current political climate very well (both Democrat and Republican). If you’re in for more [...]
Category Archive for 'Economics'
Inigo Montoya Moments in Economics
Posted in Economics on Mar 25th, 2009
I just watched The Princess Bride again a couple of days ago. One of my favorite lines in the movie is when Inigo turns to Vizinni (after he said “Inconceivable!” for the bajillionth time) and says “You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
That’s [...]
Keeping the “Dismal” in “The Dismal Science”
Posted in Economics on Mar 17th, 2009
Sorry for another non-space blog post (space posts take time!) I saw this link over on Arnold Kling’s blog, and thought it was worth sharing. The article is reviewing a book that’s almost as old as I am: The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, by Mancur Olson.
Basically, the [...]
Existence of a Crisis Does Not Imply Existence of an Easy Solution
Posted in Economics on Mar 6th, 2009
Just a quick thought on the economic situation. A few days ago, Pat Lang (who usually blogs about military issues) had a post asking people’s opinions on whether the current economic situation was just a typical business cycle downturn, or whether it was a financial Gotterdammerung. His point was that in reading a lot of [...]
Am I the only one who notices the eerie similarities between the debate over the current “stimulus” bill and the run-up to the Iraq War? The same drumbeat of propaganda coming from the press. The same repeated warnings of imminent disaster from some quarters–if we don’t give the government the emergency powers it needs to [...]
Jim Henley hit it on the head (again):
My kids bought me an insurance company! Sweet children: they don’t even have jobs yet.
I’m really looking forward to helping pick up the tab for the past several decades worth of government fiscal mismanagement in this country.
But not to worry folks! Our plucky moose-hunting Reformer (and incidentally that [...]
Orbital Access Cat Skinning Methodologies
Posted in Business, Economics, Launch Vehicles, Orbital Access Methodologies, Space Development, Space Policy, Space Transportation, Technology on Nov 13th, 2007
In order to discuss the business, finance, and policy approaches for creating low cost and reliable space transportation, it helps to have an understanding of the underlying technology, in order to provide context for those discussions. It also happens to be a lot easier for one trained primarily as an engineer (and whose business [...]
I For One Welcome Our New, Scaly Overlords…
Posted in Business, Economics, Launch Vehicles, Space Policy on Jul 21st, 2007
Well, it looks like Rand and Clark and Jeff are too busy blogging about the New Space conference to start synthesizing things yet, so I’ll just make some comments on the big news from yesterday. In case you don’t read Space Transport News every morning like most of the rest of us, it was [...]
Some Launch Economics
Posted in Business, Economics, Launch Vehicles on Mar 3rd, 2007
A commenter on my post about Soyuz launches from Kourou raised the question of whether launch prices would really drop with an increase in flight rate. This question may be due to discussions about a report prepared for NASA by a Dr Hertzfeld of GWU that was discussed on the Space Show last year. [...]
Subeconomics Resource Transformation and The Fallacy of Technological Stasis
Posted in Business, Economics, Lunar Commerce, Space Development on Dec 22nd, 2006
I just read a very interesting article on the Ludwig von Mises Insitute website, that got me thinking a bit about how to better explain my thoughts about how I think lunar markets will pan out. There are a lot of good points made in this article and I’m not sure I’ll get a [...]