Learn some economics, be entertained… (part III)
March 6th, 2008YouNotSneaky’s at it again. Why might prices be more stable under monopolies (and why might we care)?
Here’s my favorite line:
Probably less explicitly but more importantly, when prices keep changing on you it means you’ve gotta recalculate your optimal allocations of expenditure again. You gotta set up a new Lagrangian, take the damn first order conditions and figure out if making out the adjustments in your optimal consumption basket – given your income – are worth it. What? You don’t think that way? You don’t set up constrained Lagrangians every time there’s a change in prices and compute your Kuhn-Tucker conditions?
March 6th, 2008 at 9:49 am
S’kind of like when dogs do differential calculus to figure out the optimal path to a stick thrown into a pond.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Or how pool players know Newtonian physics!
March 6th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
swong, you’ve heard of this?
March 6th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Yeah… I remembered the article, but I’ve never read the book.
Ever since, I’ve thought of those “gut” calculations as “dog math.” Really fun when you get into arguments with your mathematician friends over how much trig a basketball player needs to know.