Hopefully Interesting

This is almost a followup to the earlier post on inflation , but at times I'll be neglecting some of the complications I mentioned earlier.  If I were a paid teacher I'd feel embarrassed about my pedagogy here, but as I'm just a blogger I'll shrug and move on. When you read in the news that the price of, say, hats has gone up recently do you have any reason to think that there were more or less hats sold recently?  You might think about an individual store raising its prices, resulting in less sales, but things like that seldom happen with a general prices level.  Generally, there are going to be two possible explanations.  It might be that hats suddenly became much more fashionable, and everyone wanted one.  Since people are willing to pay more for hats, shop owners will charge more - and the higher hat prices will cause people to produce more hats too (demand has risen).  Or it might be that a horrible felt plague has...

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen  is a book by Kwame Anthony Appiah that I read not-so-very-recently, and were it not for a certain laziness ought to have written about immediately.  The author goes over several moral revolutions that have happened in history, times where behaviors that were previously been socially acceptable or even de rigueur  suddenly became socially unacceptable.  The specific examples in the book were dueling and slavery in the UK, and foot binding in China. The thing I found most interesting was that convincing people that certain behaviors was wrong was apparently not very effective at getting people to stop them.  Even when everybody agreed that dueling was in some sense wrong and not something that civilized people ought to engage in, and even after it had become illegal, people were still afraid of other's considering them cowards if they didn't duel.  Likewise with foot-binding, people might have tho...