Most econobloggers, myself included, find it hard enough to drink from the
firehose of current information. (My RSS reader currently has 7,148 unread items.)
But Mark Thoma, econoblogger extraordinaire, not only seems
to manage to keep up on current news and debates, but also manages to find
utter gems like this one, an essay by Joan Robinson from
1936. Go read it. Among many other things, it more or less explains the existence
of 90% of the Wall Street Joural’s editorial page long before that ignoble institution
existed in its present form. What’s more, the lucidity of the prose puts essentially
all of today’s professional economists to shame. The basic gist is that the
rich use economics – or, more to the point, economists – to delude
themselves that they shouldn’t give their money away.
Coincidentally, Barry Ritholtz reprints
a Tom Toles cartoon wherein the WSJ editorial page runs a story
headlined "Rich Insufficiently Rich, Study Proves". After 71 of the
most momentous years in human history, nothing has changed.
If you want another reason to give away your wealth, try being rich on a cruise
ship in a storm. The biggest and most expensive cabins tend to be the highest
up, where the movement and the seasickness is the greatest. And along similar
lines, Yves Smith has found
a Popular Mechanics survey which shows that on airplanes, first-class
seats are by far the most dangerous to sit in. If you’re in a plane crash
and sitting at the back of the plane, your chances of survival are 69%. At the
front of the plane, they’re 49%.
But what if you want your wealth in order to buy Chris Dillow’s new
book?
Well, it turns out that you shouldn’t
buy it after all.
So, what are you waiting for? If you need a good destination for your cash,
you could do a lot worse than to start here.