witchkisser:

nostalgebraist:

Incidentally, for the longest time I misread “tinyurl” in shortened links as “tinyuri,” and was left picturing lesbian steampunk manga robots

boy have i got the manga for you

tin yuri is real

(via witchkisser)

rageofthedogstar:

per @nostalgebraists request, here’s a quick and dirty summary of the prologue to Bowle’s Microeconomics. (If you’re interested, here’s the book on Amazon).

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In the 14th century, the area currently known as Bangladesh was “a country abounding in rice”, while in Europe people were consuming fewer than 2000 calories a day. Six centuries later, Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world and it’s people undernourished, while European wages have increased 10-fold or more. This reversal of fortune can be credited to a set of institutions known as capitalism, which were adopted in Europe and not Bangladesh (which instead saw the entrenchment of powerful landlords).

Likewise, in 1700 Mexico’s per-capita income was about that of the British colonies’, and in 1800 Cuba and Haiti had higher per-capita incomes than the US. Now, Mexico and Haiti have per-capita incomes less than a third of the US. Once again, this can be shown to be the result of different institutional adoption.

However, these differences aren’t well addressed by the standard Neoclassical/Walrasian economic paradigm, which assumes that institutions are “free”. And it makes a variety of other simplifying assumptions:

• Individuals make choices based on far-sighted, rational calculations
  
• Individuals have self-regarding, exogenous preferences
  
• Social interactions take the form of contractual exchanges
  
• Positive feedback loops (“generalized increasing returns”) can be ignored
  

However, the real world differs from these assumptions in many ways:

• Most social interactions are non-contractual, and most contracting is incomplete - it’s unenforceable to make a worker work hard, for instance.
  
• People do not generally engage in forward-looking optimizing processes, instead draw on a limited repertoire of behaviors.
  
• While people are self-interested, they also often care about other people, and are willing to reduce their own benefit to help others or to punish someone who has harmed others.
  
• People are heterogeneous, some more self-interested, some less self-interested
  
• People have stable irrationalities - intransitivity, loss aversion, etc.
  
• Behaviors can be transmitted by people copying successful ones, or by other means - forward-looking analyses can be misleading
  
• Generalized increasing returns mean that small effects or random events can have durable consequences over long timeframes.
  

Economics must draw upon insights from all behavioral sciences, including ecology and biology. Deriving results from behavioral axioms (the Neoclassical/Walrasian paradigm) will not suffice. And account must be taken of the specific institutions and other surrounding empirical facets of a given economic interaction, and not merely assume that they can all be treated similarly.  

This book starts by introducing a variety of models that try to investigate non contractual interactions and generalized increasing returns. It then moves on to the institutions of capitalism, and ends with the process of cultural and institutional change.

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Chapter one is a brief introduction to game theory. This post is a commitment to post my notes from it by…let’s say Sunday.