A fish, livestock, or flower auction is usually almost perfect.

Information is nearly perfect and is equally available (inspection prior to bidding). The price of each trade is known to all and the costs of transaction are constant or calculable in advance.

The price is directly linked to the desireability of the product and the capacity of the purchaser to make a margin from reselling OR to be satsified that the product is sufficiently superior to an alternative product such that the difference in price is a proxy for the increase in their “utility” or happiness.

the tar sands analogy is perfectly appropriate. Just you differ on the definition of right and wrong with the state of Alberta.

This is the best book on economics, ever. 8)

🙂 Probably RTRPs favourite book too…

It is actually one of my favourite books… he’d have loved mountain biking, I’m sure.

mountain biking

all that repressed commercialism, bling bits and bontrager frames? I think not. Hair-shirted hiking in canvas moccasins. That would have been Thoreau’s style…

It’s easy to talk about how bad capitalism is when you’re surrounded by the ease it’s given you.

Not that I am a pro-capitalist – I am an environmentalist and a socialist, but I’m also a pragmatist.

I have a large collection of ists.

Bontrager frames are the mtbing equivalent of hair-shirted hiking in canvas moccasins. 8)

I have a large collection of ists.

Nasty – see your GP.

I’m a, er, champagne pragmatist.

OK, I’ve read Walden now. The philosophy is great but the natural history is a bit dull.

In the meantime I’ve also come across a few other things that I would have added to the conversation if I’d known about them at the time.

Stoner, here’s one for you: The Crash Course

And molgrips here’s one for you: Amish and technology

Also Stoner, with reference to your example of a a perfect market for fish, maybe you should go see: The End of the Line

The philosophy is great but the natural history is a bit dull.

au contraire, I greatly enjoyed his observations on Nat.Hist. and other sundry local phenomena… (rambles endlessly). 🙂

Perhaps the pay discrepiency between different jobs is less down to sexual discrimination and more down to the historic strength of the jobs Union. Obviously the strength of the union could be down to it being male dominated in a time when women weren’t involved in such things commonally, allowing a particular job to get a head start.

Getting rid of unions would result in better value for money in my opinion…. the RMT being a prime example, striking for a better payrise when they’d already been offered a good one.

I’d say a nurse has more value to society and skill than a tube driver (the only reason they’re not driverless is down to unions!), but one starts on 18k(?) and the other on 42k. That is largely down to the union – i.e. people manipulating with the market.

So get rid of unions, allow the market to sort it out the real value of things. I suspect that assuming you maintained equality laws, this would also balance any pay differential.

Trouble is, when we allow the market to sort it out we end up with this:

Of course it could be that there is much less discrepency in pay than some would like to make out:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2009/06/womens_minister_used_misleadin.html

Comparing men and women who work full-time, the gender pay gap is 12.8%, the ONS preferred measure.

Looking at part-time workers, women actually do better than men: their hourly rate is 3.4% higher than their male counterparts.

But when you add the two together, because part-timers get paid less than full-timers and because there are nearly four times as many part-time female workers as there are male, the gap appears to jump to 22.6%, which the GEO rounds up to 23%.

In other words, because women have more opportunity to work part time, and often do even if they have good well paid jobs, that means that the average for full time women’s jobs comes down – and the average for part time women’s jobs goes up. So it becomes pretty much self-perpetuating.

Of course, Harriet Harman wouldn’t be deliberately misleading, would she?

If one accepts my ONS source’s version of events, this was not a professional difference of opinion between two statistical experts. Harriet Harman’s officials preferred their in-house interpretation of the data to the independent and professional one because, one might assume, it made the case for their controversial Equalities Bill look a little stronger.

Attached to the letter from Sir Michael Scholar are the notes from the Monitoring and Assessment team at the authority which investigated the case. This suggests that it is not just the GEO which may occasionally get political with the numbers.

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission refers to a gender pay gap of 35.6% for women working part-time. It comes to this conclusion by comparing the mean hourly earnings of female part-time workers with those of male full-time workers.

Oh, turns out she would. Who knew?