Christian Baaki
@christianbaaki
Christian Baaki
The Iron Law of Oligarchy: every field of human endeavor, every kind of organization, will always be led by a relatively small elite.
If the watchword of the market economy is profit, the watchword of bureaucracy is growth.
Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. In a Wall Street Journal article in 1993, he stated that “no matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5 percent of GDP.” What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated.
The chart on this page, updating the... See more
The chart on this page, updating the... See more
W. Kurt Hauser • Hauser’s Law
“When we speak of someone as well-read, we should have this in mind. Too often, we use that phrase to mean the quantity rather than the quality of reading. A person who has read widely but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised.”
Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book
... See moreTo my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that’s going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures. And I actually tested this out for myself. I read one hunk of Gibbon ‘s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, then I read a part of War and Peace which is a grand historical novel, right, so I figured that’s
Trillions in new money, 9 percent inflation, or a 8 percent rise in nominal GDP tells us nothing about who received the new dollars first, whose assets inflated earliest, or who was left holding the bag of devalued cash. By aggregating away the order of receipt, these metrics reduce one of the largest wealth transfers in modern history to a “macro
... See more... See moreThe scope of federal activities has expanded in recent decades along with the size of the federal budget. The federal government subsidizes farming, health care, school lunches, rural utilities, the energy industry, rental housing, aviation, passenger rail, public broadcasting, job training, foreign aid, urban transit, and many other activities.
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State the book’s structure and purpose in 1-2 sentences. Explain each component of the book and how the components interact with the whole. Clearly define the problems the author is trying to solve.
From How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren
A great product: simple solution to one problem, frictionless