Bartlett: Supply-Side Keynes?

The two faces of Janus. [A]

"As final proof of Keynes's 'supply-side' tendencies, one might also point out that he understood the existence of the Laffer Curve long before Arthur Laffer was born. In 'The Means to Prosperity,' written in 1933, Keynes said: 

'Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget. For to take the opposite view today is to resemble a manufacturer who, running at a loss, decides to raise his price, and when his declining sales increase the loss, wrapping himself in the rectitude of plain arithmetic, decides that prudence requires him to raise the price still more-and who, when at last his account is balanced with nought on both sides, is still found righteously declaring that it would have been the act of a gambler to reduce the price when you were already making a loss'."

Bits and Pieces: The Meaning of "Dickensian".

(source)

Christmas was approaching and Tim Worstall angrily demanded people to try and look up the meaning of "Dickensian".

Your wish is my command, govnah!

Bridgman, Elephants, and the Judges of Science.

The name Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961) will hardly ring a bell among econosophers. Physicists may remember him as the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics

"For the invention of an apparatus to produce extremely high pressures, and for the discoveries he made therewith in the field of high pressure physics".

More of an experimentalist than a theoretician, Bridgman, however, was interested in the philosophy of physics. His ideas, under the label "operationalism", when applied to other fields, met with less than spectacular results.

Many of his observations (like those below, from his 1950 book "Reflections of a Physicist"), however, seem as valid today as they were 60 years ago and their application could go beyond physics:

Joan Robinson and the Elephant.

[A]

Joan Robinson knows one when she sees one:

"I cannot define an elephant but I know one when I see it. An ideology is much more like an elephant than like a point." (Robinson 1962:8)
"Scientific method is another kind of elephant -- something which exists and can be described, not defined." (p. 25)

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