Chris Coyle: "As James Buchanan, borrowing from Herbert Spencer, says: "Only by varied reiteration can alien conceptions be forced on reluctant minds."" Dr. Joseph Goebeels: "Repeat a lie a thousand times and it becomes the truth ..."#

Jane Galt started a large thread about the Efficient Markets Theory. Some people think it's dead, she doesn't.#

In short, prices may not match the intrinsic value of the stock. But the odds are against you systematically outperforming the market in estimating what that intrinsic value is.

Now, there are a lot of caveats. Efficient markets theory only works as long as a sufficient number of people don't think it does; if we all stuck our money in index funds, the market would lose the information it needs to be efficient.

And I'm acquainted with a value investor, a disciple of Warren Buffet's, who makes a convincing argument that the Uncle Warren School of Value Investing in fact does generate excess returns for those who follow it closely. This may well be true, but it's somewhat recursive: value investing (like efficient markets) only works as long as a lot of people don't think it works. If a lot of people pursue a value strategy, value opportunities will soon be arbitraged away. It tends to work best in thinly traded areas of the market; you are vanishingly unlikely to make money (as Uncle Warren did), by buying Coke because you think it's undervalued.

William L. Anderson writes about the "hoax" of "food deserts."#

According to a recent story in the Associated Press, we now have "food deserts" in this country, which is another way of saying that some people live in places that are not served by large grocery chains. Thus, in order to purchase food, they either have to walk for a long distance (up to a mile or more in some places) or drive longer distances. These "deserts" can be located in rural or urban settings; the common thread is the lack of a nearby Safeway.

As one who in his professional life has heard numerous complaints about the alleged "oppression" that is created by the presence of a Wal-Mart or some other large chain store, it is interesting to see how the academic left shifts gears and now blames these same retailers for not having enough stores in existence. Social activists have worked overtime to keep the Wal-Marts and Safeways from opening in rural and urban areas; now we see that the real problem, according to activists, is that many rural and urban people do not have access to the inexpensive food that these markets sell.

Michael Brandon McClellan writes about King Arthur: "And so we have it. It wasn't noble Christian British knights who sat around Arthur's round table and forged the legendary Camelot. It was the combined ingenuity of pagan Woad face-painters and Central Asian cavalrymen. It was not a refined queen who embodied the ideal medieval Lady, but an arrow-slinging Goth chick. And for good measure, don't forget, it was the technologically advanced barbarians who brought sophisticated artillery into battle, not the Romans. I'm sure glad that Hollywood has set the record straight. I was worried we were being fed a bunch of rubbish."#

Chip Gibbons responds to my comment about his definition of science.#

What are the logical conclusions?

Objective truth is not subject to agreement. The earth is not flat because a certain number of people agree that it is. Why would I care if others agree with me. I should only be motivated to find out if reality agrees with me.

It might seem a little quirky because it's a definition by results. If you draw the line between existence and nonexistence correctly, then you were doing science. If you get the two mixed up, then you weren't.

But to define science purely as process without the requirement that it be related to existence sets no standard for the output of the process. Consequently, I'm sure that much of what we think of as science today will appear to be primitive voodoo was the body of knowledge continues to evolve.

This is what I meant:

The conversation was about economics and if a certain group of people (Tyler Cowen and Brian Leiter) thought that it was a science. I was essentially wondering, "Why do these people want (or not want) economics to be a science, and what do they mean by that?" They do not say what they mean by a science. Chip, however, does state a wonderful definition of science that I agree with. My comment was that I don't think the other people used the same definition, explicitly or implicitly.

To demonstrate that is true, that they don't feel science has to describe existence, you can just look at Chip's original post where he mentions Prof. Cowen's belief in "public goods," which do not exist by the logical conclusions of Chip's definition of science.

Why does it matter if others agree with Chip or not? Firstly, because I was wondering about what they thought, so having a good definition of science that they don't agree with doesn't get me very far in this goal. And secondly, because if you know that others share the same definition then you can more easily measure their contribution to science for integration into your understanding of existence. If someone has an alternative definition that is not equivalent, then I know I'm going to have to do very in depth study of their work to see if there is truth in it, versus when another shares the same definition I can have a marginally easier time evaluating it.

Alex Tabarrok writes about recent McDonalds innovation.#

Who would have guessed that when taking drive-thru orders at a McDonald's it's more efficient to send the order not 25ft into the restaurant but 900 miles away to a call-in center which then relays the order via computer to the workers inside the restaurant making the food. To avoid errors, the system also takes a digital picture of the customer to accompany each order (the picture is destroyed once the order is complete). That's the way it's done at a Cape Giradeau, MO restaurant and at some dozen others which send their orders to a call center in Colorado.

Scott Wickstein remembers the 60th anniversary of a plot to kill Hitler.#

Greg Ransom quotes Edward Fesser on F. A. Hayek's moral views.#

Those whose libertarianism is grounded in Lockean, Aristotelian, or Hayekian thinking are far more likely to take a conservative line on the [issue of abortion]. To be sure, there are plenty of "pro-choice" libertarians influenced by Hayek. But by far most of these libertarians are (certainly in my experience anyway) inclined to accept Hayek's economic views while soft-pedaling or even dismissing the Burkean traditionalist foundations he gave for his overall social theory. Those who endorse the latter, however, are going to be hard-pressed not to be at least suspicious of the standard moral and legal arguments offered in defense of abortion ..

Nor can a Hayekian analysis of social institutions fail to imply anything but skepticism about the case for same-sex marriage. Hayek's position was that traditional moral rules, especially when connected to institutions as fundamental as the family and found nearly universally in human cultures, should be tampered with only with the most extreme caution. The burden of proof is always on the innovator rather than the traditionalist, whether or not the traditionalist can justify his conservatism to the innovator's satisfaction; and change can be justified only by showing that the rule the innovator wants to abandon is in outright contradiction to some other fundamental traditional rule. But that there is any contradiction in this case is simply implausible, especially when one considers the traditional natural law understanding of marriage sketched above."

Joel Spolsky writes about Microsoft hiring practices.#

Dr. Ron Paul writes about the Millennium Challenge Act.#

The question nobody in Washington wants to answer is this: What gives the Congress the right to send American tax dollars overseas in the first place? Certainly not the Constitution. Why should American taxpayers, many of whom are poor themselves, be expected to fund foreign welfare? Remember that the poorest Americans are hardest hit by the inflation tax, which is the direct result of deficit spending and the printing of new money to service federal debts.

Congress hardly needs to concoct another way to spend money. Government debt already exceeds seven trillion dollars, and runaway spending will force yet another increase in the federal debt ceiling law before the end of the year. At its current pace, Congress soon will create single-year deficits of one trillion dollars. Combine this indebtedness with future liabilities — in the form of exploding Social Security and Medicare obligations — and it's clear that Congress can find better things to do with $2.5 billion than send it overseas.

Alex Tabarrok writes about capitalism and women.#

Both indicators increase strongly with economic freedom. Capitalism is good for women. Correlation doesn't imply causation, of course, and causality, if it exists, could run from economic freedom to women's development from women's development to capitalism or a third factor could cause both - probably all three processes are involved to some extent. Nevertheless, at a minimum the graph indicates that capitalism and gender development are compatible contrary to many radicals. It's interesting that no country with the high levels of economic freedom has a low score on either index. The graph actually underestimates the relationship between freedom and women's development because there are many countries, Gambia for example, with incomplete data and we can be pretty sure that these countries have low economic freedom and low gender development.

David S. Landes makes a claim about gender empowerment in Chapter 24 of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations on page 413.