My son Tristan recently quoted this passage from Thomas Macaulay’s “Southey’s Colloquies on Society” – and I instantly realized that telling people to stop thinking like a tourist goes back over a century:
Mr. Southey has found out a way, he tells us, in which the effects of
manufactures and agriculture may be compared. And what is this way? To
stand on a hill, to look at a cottage and a factory, and to see which is
the prettier.
Aug 3 2017
Over at TheMoneyIllusion I did a post discussing the issue of whether central banks should be thought of as "controlling" interest rates. Here's one excerpt: There are powerful cognitive illusions here. The day-to-day Fed "control" over rates creates the illusion of much more control than actually exists. Monetary ...
Aug 2 2017
Above is a picture of a tool I borrowed from a neighbor (or, should I say "neighbour" since I'm at my cottage in Canada.) The main insight from the classic "I, Pencil" is that no single person knows how to make a pencil but that it is made using an extensive, international division of labor and is done so well and eff...
Aug 1 2017
My son Tristan recently quoted this passage from Thomas Macaulay's "Southey's Colloquies on Society" - and I instantly realized that telling people to stop thinking like a tourist goes back over a century: Mr. Southey has found out a way, he tells us, in which the effects of manufactures and agriculture may be compare...
READER COMMENTS
Daniel Klein
Aug 1 2017 at 4:58pm
Reminds me of this in Smith’s TMS:
“A prison is certainly more useful to the public than a palace; and the person who founds the one is generally directed by a much juster spirit of patriotism, than he who builds the other. But the immediate effects of a prison, the confinement of the wretches shut up in it, are disagreeable; and the imagination either does not take time to trace out the remote ones, or sees them at too great a distance to be much affected by them. A prison, therefore, will always be a disagreeable object; and the fitter it is for the purpose for which it was intended, it will be the more so. A palace, on the contrary, will always be agreeable; yet its remote effects may often be inconvenient to the public.”
john hare
Aug 1 2017 at 7:22pm
A factory is much prettier as it enables many people to afford cottages. Doesn’t work for the myopic.
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