In the past, I used to try and respond to all comments. Time constraints do not allow me that luxury any more. I sincerely appreciate the comments, however, and my thanks for those thoughtful comments. Some comments which call for a clarification or further elaboration of the subject, I will respond in subsequent posts.
I generally don’t censor comments and I don’t remove comments, however irrelevant to the post, unless it is pure spam. Some comments test my resolve about not removing comments. Those are the type which clearly indicate that …

My distaste for poverty is only exceeded by my utter contempt for those who nurture that awful monster of poverty that chews up living human beings and spits them out like so much garbage. True evil to me is that impulse that disregards human suffering, and more often than not, that evil force emanates from ideology and dogma. Communism is one such evil; the other horror is organized religious dogma mostly represented by the monotheistic religions. The richer the organized religion, the more powerful it is, and has the …

A brief reminder is in order here because from time to time, I do resort to very simple economic models. The utility of simple models in assisting thinking about complex matters is under-appreciated by most of us whose professional interests do not require model-based thinking. In the hard sciences, physicists and cosmologists commonly use models to clarify their thinking and illuminate the essential features of the complex theoretical subjects they study. Where the search space of a solution is unmanageable large, simulations based on simple models come in handy, such …