> Jevons observed that England's consumption of coal soared after James Watt introduced the Watt steam engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of the coal-fired steam engine from Thomas Newcomen's earlier design.
This is good, I believe efficient use of resources is key to a better standard of living.
But all externalities should be priced-in: the cost of pollution should be paid to the people suffering from it.
Dear Mr. User, a whole year has passed, in order to keep up with the latest trends we now require you to give permission for mining your user data via our new microservice every time you enter our site, we have made sure the experience will be a pleasant one, as we added 5 mb of JS and a full screen video to keep your browser occupied as we process your requests.
Be aware that nothing substantial has changed, only the UI has again changed for no apparent reason, the site is now once again trice as large and hangs twice as much on previous generation mobile devices.
Dear Mr. Software Developer, as you might know all useful software now runs on the web. Writing a web browser is no small task, this is why at Google and W3C we pride ourself in growing our spec beyond any reasonable proportions to make sure you don't try to create a competitor to render a simple HTML5 page. After all, why would you?
While some forms of comparative advantage might occur in the real world, Ricardo's theory, like so much of economics, abstracts away fundamental facts about the financial and biophysical aspects of development to such an extent that I do not see it as a useful tool of economic analysis. See for instance:
This in general seems like a good reason for realism over empiricism within economics, many toy theories such as Ricardian comparative advantage can be used to interpret real world data and be assigned scientific credibility in the process, you have to open up the black boxes at all levels of aggregation to get beyond that.
This is my theory too. A friend of me noted that one positive thing about lock-down is the complete lack of FOMO (fear of missing out). Which seems particularly important at that age.
It's almost as if putting kids in a peer-pressure-cooker environment is a bad idea?
I might be biased, I'm autistic and my high school experiences were abhorrent and ended up scarring me for life. Primary school and college were fine, but high school? Forget about it, absolute bloody nightmare :)
Of course government can decide private property law. Slaves used to be private property. And you can't do whatever you want once you own a piece of land, see environmental laws etc.
