Links - Economic Hope

It can and has gotten better.

Having just written on economic idiocy, I thought it would be good to add a couple of more hopeful links as an offset.

First, it is good to realize that while things used to “cost more”, they then MUCH more expensive. Gale Pooley reminds us of this in this great, concise piece on why time prices are superior to money prices in measuring resource cost (abundance) over time.

There are six reasons that time is a better way to measure than money. First, time prices contain more information than money prices.

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Second, time prices transcend all of the complications associated with trying to convert nominal prices to real prices.

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Third, time prices can be calculated on any product with any currency at any time and any place.

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Fourth, time is an objective and universal constant.

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Fifth, time cannot be inflated or counterfeited.

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Sixth, we have perfect equality of time with exactly 24 hours in a day.

Second, Johan Norberg gives us a great essay on what brings human progress.

“It may be that the Enlightenment has ‘tried’ to happen countless times,” writes the British physicist David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity. And therefore, it puts our own lucky escape into stark perspective: All previous efforts were cut short, “always snuffed out, usually without a trace. Except this once.”

It should make us deeply grateful that we are among the few who happen to be born in the only era of self-sustained, global progress. But it should also make us focused and combative. History teaches us that progress is not automatic. It only happened because people fought hard for it and for the system of liberty that made it possible.

If we want to remain the one great exception to history’s rule of oppression and stagnation, every new generation must find it within itself the desire to make the world safe for progress.

Keep calm and carry on.