Новости за 13.12.2016

Economics text-books conventionally begin by defining the economics as the study of how society goes about allocating scarce resources in conditions of potentially unlimited demand. But scarcity is a subjective condition, a product of human psychology. A world of scarcity to one person can be a world of abun­dance to another, if their desires differ enough. Economists study how to manage supply and demand. Should they also study how to manage desire?

Alan Yentob is Britain’s “most influential TV executive of the last half-century”. He created or enabled Omnibus, Arena, The Late Show, Have I Got News for You?, Life on Mars, The Office, The Thick of It, QI, Sherlock, Strictly Come Dancing — “and on and on and on and on”. So, is he a national hero? Not quite. “He is ludicrously vain, he lives ridiculously, and he is unbelievably snobbish. You ask yourself, does he deliver value sufficiently to justify all those nonsenses? And yes he does, you know... Читать дальше...

Painstaking excavations uncover more of the great pre-Columbian city of Cahokia, which rose a thousand years ago where East St Louis now stands. Cahokia’s population of 30,000 in 1100 made it bigger than Paris; but it was deserted by 1400, following civil unrest perhaps triggered by years of drought. “The elites of Monk’s Mound erected an enormous wooden palisade wall, effectively enclosing themselves in a walled neighborhood. Shortly thereafter, the Grand Plaza fell into disrepair”

On the economics of kidnapping as a business. So long as kidnappers rely on insurance payments, the insurers get to set the rules. “The first principle for insurers is that safe retrieval of hostages is para­mount. The second principle is that kidnapping cannot become too wildly profitable, for fear of further destabilization. Insurers have created institutions to make sure that ransom offers meet kidnapper expectations and produce safe releases but that do not upset local criminal markets”

Open borders and unconstrained migration would make the world a richer and happier place overall — but some countries might disappear through depopulation, and their cultures with them. “Should people in Mali be forced to live in Mali because somebody in London thinks that some variety of human existence would be lost if they all came to England? The world has lost Marcomanni, Quadi, Sarmatians, Visigoths, Alans, Vandals, Avars and thousands others. Do we really miss them today?”

The name is Trail. Pepper Trail. “Give him a single feather or a small fragment of a claw or a cooked hunk of breast meat, and he’ll tell you the species of bird from which it came. As the world’s leading criminal forensic ornithologist, Trail is asked day in and day out to perform these exact tasks. Over the past 18 years he has assisted with hundreds of investigations, testified in federal court 15 times, and handled more bird carcasses than anyone should”

A South African doctor writes: The easiest way to cut five minutes off the world marathon record very quickly would be to run the race on a downhill course. Or use sprung running shoes — which, for Nike, would be a natural. “Since about 2007, I’ve wondered about the capacity of shoes to make a large impact on performance. That’s because it was in 2007 that Oscar Pistorius began his campaign to run in able-bodied races, and that forced me to think about advantage through technology”

Read and weep. “I remembered what I felt through much of 2008, as I watched Barack Obama’s star shoot across the political sky. I had never seen so many white people cheer on a black man who was neither an athlete nor an entertainer. And it seemed that they loved him for this, and I thought in those days, which now feel so long ago, that they might then love me, too, and love my wife, and love my child, and love us all in the manner that the God they so fervently cited had commanded”