Marginal Revolution University
Published on 1 Nov 2016Finding a job can be kind of like dating. When a new graduate enters the labor market, she may have the opportunity to enter into a long-term relationship with several companies that aren’t really a good fit. Maybe the pay is too low or the future opportunities aren’t great. Before settling down with the right job, this person is still considered unemployed. Specifically, she’s experiencing frictional unemployment.
In the United States’ dynamic economy, this is a common state of short-term unemployment. Companies are often under high levels of competition and frequently evolve. They go out of business or have to lay off workers. Or maybe the worker quits to find a better position. In fact, millions of separations and new hires occur every month accompanied by short periods of unemployment.
Frictional unemployment helps allocate human capital (i.e. workers) to its highest valued use. Hopefully, workers are similarly finding themselves with more fulfilling jobs. Even when it’s caused by an event such as a firm going out of business, frictional unemployment is a normal part of a healthy, growing economy.
March 8, 2018
Frictional Unemployment
Trump’s ideology is more like psychology
Jonah Goldberg on how Trump’s instincts are far more significant to his behaviour than any residual attachment to an ideology:
On the left, there’s an enormous investment in the idea that Trump isn’t a break with conservatism but the apotheosis of it. This is a defensible, or at least understandable, claim if you believe conservatism has always been an intellectually vacuous bundle of racial and cultural resentments. But if that were the case, Commentary magazine’s Noah Rothman recently noted, you would not see so many mainstream and consistent conservatives objecting to Trump’s behavior.
Intellectuals and ideologically committed journalists on the left and right have a natural tendency to see events through the prism of ideas. Trump presents an insurmountable challenge to such approaches because, by his own admission, he doesn’t consult any serious and coherent body of ideas for his decisions. He trusts his instincts.
Trump has said countless times that he thinks his gut is a better guide than the brains of his advisers. He routinely argues that the presidents and policymakers who came before him were all fools and weaklings. That’s narcissism, not ideology, talking.
Even the “ideas” that he has championed consistently — despite countervailing evidence and expertise — are grounded not in arguments but in instincts. He dislikes regulations because, as a businessman, they got in his way. He dislikes trade because he has a childish, narrow understanding of what “winning” means. Foreigners are ripping us off. Other countries are laughing at us. He doesn’t actually care about, let alone understand, the arguments suggesting that protectionism can work. Indeed, he reportedly issued his recent diktat on steel tariffs in a fit of pique over negative media coverage and the investigation into Russian election interference. His administration was wholly unprepared for the announcement.
News emanating from the White House is always more understandable once you accept that Trumpist policy is downstream of Trump’s personality.
History of the Vikings (in One Take)
History Bombs
Published on 15 Feb 2018History of the Vikings (in One Take) by History Bombs
THIS IS THE AGE OF THE VIKING…
From the first raid on Lindisfarne in 793 to the fall of Harald Hardrada in 1066, we take an exciting tour through the Viking Age.
The Vikings had a remarkable global impact. Their long boats gave them a technological advantage that enabled them to dominate the sea and establish settlements across Northern Europe.
Ivar the Boneless established Danelaw and controlled central England for many years. Only Alfred the Great of Wessex was able to halt the Vikings advance across England by defeating Guthrum.
To the east, the Vikings were employed in modern-day Turkey as guards to Byzantine Emperors for four hundred years. The guard was called the ‘Varangian Guard’.
The video also includes the intrepid explorer, Leif Erikson, who is believed to have discovered North America some 500 years before Christopher Colombus!
This video was filmed in Northern Ireland and we would like to thank Magnus Vikings for use of their fantastic longboat!
Thank you for watching 🙂
Cast (in order of appearance): Guy Kelly, Robert Brown, Chris Hobbs, Suzie Preece, Tom Tokley, Richard Sherwood, John Henry Falle, Corinna Jane, Adrian Stevenson, Martin Savage, Richard Soames
Script & Music: Chris Hobbs
Director: Ellie Rogers
Producer: Claire O’Brien
Camera: Ryan Kernaghan
Focus Puller: Matt Farrant
Costumes: Alex Walker
Grade: Jack Kibbey NewmanScript Contributions: Ellie Rogers, John Henry Falle, Guy Kelly, Tom Tokley
Longship supplied by Magnus Vikings: http://www.magnusvikings.com/
Costumes supplied by Hampshire Wardrobe: https://www.hampshireculturaltrust.or…
QotD: Rationalizing slavery
“Scientific racism,” the theory that races fall into a hierarchy of mental sophistication with Northern Europeans at the top, is a prime example. It was popular in the decades flanking the turn of the 20th century, apparently supported by craniometry and mental testing, before being discredited in the middle of the 20th century by better science and by the horrors of Nazism. Yet to pin ideological racism on science, in particular on the theory of evolution, is bad intellectual history. Racist beliefs have been omnipresent across history and regions of the world. Slavery has been practiced by every major civilization and was commonly rationalized by the belief that enslaved peoples were inherently suited to servitude, often by God’s design. Statements from ancient Greek and medieval Arab writers about the biological inferiority of Africans would curdle your blood, and Cicero’s opinion of Britons was not much more charitable.
Steven Pinker, “The Intellectual War on Science”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018-02-13.
