Published on 7 Apr 2015
Now that we’ve learned a little about price discrimination, we can begin to think about whether or not price discrimination is bad for society. How does price discrimination affect output, and what is this effect on social welfare? If price discrimination increases output, it is likely beneficial for society. If output isn’t increased, social welfare is reduced. What are some examples of perfect price discrimination? Universities practice perfect price discrimination all the time. Students pay different amounts for their education based on many different factors surrounding each student’s ability to pay. This practice increases profits and also increases the number of students able to attend college. For this reason, price discrimination by universities likely increases social welfare.
March 16, 2016
The Social Welfare of Price Discrimination
Game of Thrones is “only tits and dragons”
Ian McShane spills the beans on some of the roles he’s played:
… McShane has made this brief return to British television, because this is where he made his name, back in the Eighties, with the comedy drama Lovejoy. That show, in which he played a lovable but roguish antiques dealer, would attract around 16 million viewers and turn him into an unlikely sex symbol.
After that, he went to Hollywood and never looked back, making films such as Sexy Beast, Hot Rod and the blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean. Most notably, he starred in the cult television series Deadwood (2004-06), about a South Dakota gold mining town in the lawless 1870s. He played the saloon bar and brothel owner Al Swearengen, known as much for his poetically foul mouth as for his calm way of being violent. With its subtle characterisation and rich, almost Shakespearean language, Deadwood earned huge critical acclaim and eight Emmys, including a Best Actor award for McShane.
[…]
He is also about to appear in Game of Thrones. In his cavalier way the other day, he lit up the internet by letting slip that his character, a priest, brings back a popular character who was thought to have died in an earlier episode. “You say the slightest thing and the internet goes ape,” he says. “I was accused of giving the plot away, but I just think get a f—ing life. It’s only tits and dragons”.
They asked me if I wanted to do Game of Thrones and I said, “Sure, I’ll be able to see my old pals Charlie Dance and Stephen Dillane” and they said, “No, we’ve killed them off.” I wasn’t sure whether I could commit, but then they said it would only be for one episode, so I said, “So that means I must die at the end of it. Great, I’m in.” (And with that, he gives away another plot twist.)
QotD: The Great Depression
How bad was the Great Depression? Over the four years from 1929 to 1933, production at the nation’s factories, mines, and utilities fell by more than half. People’s real disposable incomes dropped 28 percent. Stock prices collapsed to one-tenth of their pre-crash height. The number of unemployed Americans rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933. One of every four workers was out of a job at the Depression’s nadir, and ugly rumors of revolt simmered for the first time since the Civil War.
Old myths never die; they just keep showing up in college economics and political science textbooks. Students today are frequently taught that unfettered free enterprise collapsed of its own weight in 1929, paving the way for a decade-long economic depression full of hardship and misery. President Herbert Hoover is presented as an advocate of “hands-off,” or laissez-faire, economic policy, while his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, is the economic savior whose policies brought us recovery. This popular account of the Depression belongs in a book of fairy tales and not in a serious discussion of economic history, as a review of the facts demonstrates.
To properly understand the events of the time, it is appropriate to view the Great Depression as not one, but four consecutive depressions rolled into one. The late economist Hans F. Sennholz labeled these four “phases” as follows: the business cycle; the disintegration of the world economy; the New Deal; and the Wagner Act. The first phase explains why the crash of 1929 happened in the first place; the other three show how government intervention kept the economy in a stupor for over a decade.
The Great Depression was not the country’s first depression, though it proved to be the longest. The common thread woven through the several earlier debacles was disastrous manipulation of the money supply by government. For various reasons, government policies were adopted that ballooned the quantity of money and credit. A boom resulted, followed later by a painful day of reckoning. None of America’s depressions prior to 1929, however, lasted more than four years and most of them were over in two. The Great Depression lasted for a dozen years because the government compounded its monetary errors with a series of harmful interventions.
Lawrence W. Reed, “The Great Depression was a Calamity of Unfettered Capitalism”, The Freeman, 2014-11-28.
