Comments on: Ritchie’s new economics

By: Pa Annoyed

Pa Annoyed — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:26:20 +0000

“This is because resources necessary for the satisfaction of our desires are limited.”

This is because those resources take knowledge and effort to make. We are limited to the extent that our time and knowledge are limited.

I think what he is talking about is an absolute limit, valid forever. What economics talks about are temporary limits, valid until somebody invents a better way of doing it.

By “accepting constraints” he’s not talking about those temporary constraints dealt with normally in economics, he’s saying we shouldn’t try to invent better ways of doing things if they’re more resource hungry. He’s saying you can’t invent new resources, that their total is fixed and finite forever. He’s wrong.

It’s the “litany of doom”, again. It’s not new; it’s a repetition of errors dating back to Malthus and before. As a dog returns to its vomit, so leftists return to the zero-sum fallacy and its variants.

By: Dennis The Peasant

Dennis The Peasant — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:20:36 +0000

Next week? Murphy explains the concept of The Invisible Hand using hand puppets.

By: David Gillies

David Gillies — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:56:54 +0000

Murphy, in common with many quasi-literate douchebags, uses the phrase ‘begs the question’ in the catachrestic sense, whereas its real meaning is that of using an unbolstered assumption in support of an argument (a technique of which he is most fond.)

By: Luis Enrique

Luis Enrique — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:34:05 +0000

“the goal of human life is to achieve one’s potential”

I really wonder what people are thinking when they write sentences like that … does he have in mind potential, singular … in which case, how is this potential selected from the set of potential potentials? Or, as would seem more natural to me, if there are very many potentials, some better than others and mutually exclusive, how can achieving ‘them’ be our goal.

If he’s thinking that given our preferences, achieving our potential means doing the best we can, given constraints …. hey, now there’s an idea

grammatical pedantry is no attractive, so I won’t mention his mis-use of ‘begs the question’.

By: Ian B

Ian B — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:12:27 +0000

I’ve been trying to decide whether it’s worth the opportunity cost of writing a critique of the methodology of Mr. Murphy’s ringpiece diagrams over at Counting Cats.

How influential is this man?

By: PC

PC — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:58:17 +0000

Let’s hope these Guardian journalists suddenly are enlightened to this amazing ‘new economics’ and start preaching about how society can become enriched by letting ‘the people’ decide what to do with their own economic resources in a free manner.

By: Tristan

Tristan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:04:15 +0000

I think he’s trying to sell it to people like Guardian journalists who don’t have a clue about economics.