[Part of the Soviet series] How efficient was the Soviet Union at producing stuff? Why? This post has its origin in reading two articles, that you can find here and here, that among other things, claim that the Soviet Union was, contrary to common knowledge, efficient: Around the time of the Soviet collapse, the economist Peter Murrell published an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives reviewing empirical studies of efficiency in the socialist planned economies. These studies consistently failed …

What is the best possible diet you can have? It depends. There are many criteria that we can use to determine what "best" in "best diet" means. Each of them will give us an optimal diet. We can then try to see what happens when we try to optimise according to more than one. The criteria I'll consider are: Price Nutritiousness Taste Cooking time One optimal diet for price is eating just rice, for a whole month, or something like that. Obviously, that is not sustainable. The diet with th…

Adam Smith Institute's Executive Director, Sam Bowman recently wrote (well, a few weeks ago) a post explaining what neoliberalism, a label he applies to himself, is. Should we all be neoliberals? At least, not me. I have a policy of not labeling myself to try to keep my identity small. This is the reason why the 'Non-non-libertarian FAQ' I wrote has such a name. It's not a defense of libertarianism, but a critique of a critique of libertarianism. Another reason not to be a neoliberal is that the label has n…

If there is a group of people interested in communism that should be communists. But do they really know about communism? By this I don't mean their proficiency in Marxism-Leninism or Historical Materialism, but about the economic history of actually existing communist (Okay, socialist in Marxist parlance) regimes. In this post, I investigate this. My method is the following: First, I assemble a list of experts on communism. This list includes people that I've referenced before in mySoviet series, and on th…

In a previous post I argued against Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, and others, that Philosophical zombies are conceivable. In this one I challenge the P-zombie argument against physicalism. P-zombies are usually invoked to argue that physicalism is false. Philosophers seem to agree that this is the case: It seems that if zombies really are possible, then physicalism is false and some kind of dualism is true. For many philosophers that is the chief importance of the zombie idea. [...] However, not everyon…

[Part of the Soviet Union series] The Soviet labour 'market' was a peculiar one. Rather than the prevalence of unemployment, as we are used to, the Soviet Union not only achieved full employment, but also got to a situation where there were_shortages of labour,_even though a significant share of the population was working. In this post I clarify what does full employment mean in the Soviet context, and explain some aspects of their labour 'market' not covered in my previous post on this topic. As usual, thi…