Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Matt Ridley: How Ideas Have Sex

3 comments:

  1. Really good video. I'm surprised he didn't mention Friedman's exposition of Read's "I Pencil"

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6vjrzUplWU
    I was interested in the shot of the crowd as he explained Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage - a theory developed in the early 1800s and apparently totally surprising to people.

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  2. I've heard the Friedman talk many times before, but didn't realize the source. Perhaps the crowd's reactive to Ricardo shows how far economics has strayed from the simple idea of exchange and markets.

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  3. Nice talk, and it shows just how far we've come as a species through the specialization of labour and technological progress. People take it for granted nowadays, but I think it's pretty amazing that I'm communicating through a computer on a world wide network with you guys... when there's only a few thousand years that separates us from our hunter/gatherer roots. A few thousand years is microscopic in the grand scheme of things!

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