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Kudos for the Portal reference! In all seriousness do you think you might have dismissed the concerns of the others above regarding the effect of risk too readily? I remember foggily from my micro course the problems when evaluating decisions using Von Neumann's approach were to do with the implicit assumptions regarding how risk averse people were
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Mises probably expected his readers to have been familiar with Bohm Bawerk the way Human Action is written. Most people would probably say read Rothbard because he's easiest to read for beginners and also corrects (along with Hayek) many of Bohm Bawerk's errors. Having said that I would say reading the "Value and Price" part of Positive
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I dabbled in a little bit of stock trading in the past (wouldn't go into it now, though am considering commodities). I think I was following developments around 2007-2008 and I would agree with you, things were pretty weird and so hence my reluctance to enter. Some financials were doing well, which didn't match well with fundamentals. In any
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[quote]Isn't the main problem that the victims of human trafficking don't have their "documents" and hence can't comply with the identification requirements the state imposes to get anything done in this society[/quote] Fair point, I agree. I should have noted this explicitly, it does overlap as well to some extent with other forms
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[quote]Isn't human trafficking not a significant problem in the US?[/quote] The estimates vary widely and this makes sense given the obvious reasons for under-reporting. Try these which I just found from a quick google search (thought admittedly the stats from the first report are a bit dated): www.crisisaid.org/traffickstats.html www.cicatelli
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[quote] Do you have a source for that? I'd be curious to read more. [/quote] I found the information here: http://fee.org/the_freeman/detail/human-trafficking-the-other-good-reason-to-reform-immigration/ See the part on Debt bondage (won't let me copy and paste here). The article also cites the following paper which is thankfully free to download
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I see this as a quite significant problem, and certainly a means by which organised criminals wreak much havoc and do much harm to people in this world. Of human trafficking victims (a large portion being women and children) coming into the US alone (thus not including domestic victims), 60% were for sex trafficking and I think the industry alone is
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[quote]If so, I don't think this is necessarily complete. We know how much revenue the firm receives, but not how much profit. If it receives negligible profit from both a and b, then the assignment of factors of production as described by me above would not happen. Instead, c would be getting produced by C and either a or b by A. Gaining B, at
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[quote]I am not aware of any Austrian treatment of problems with even limited uncertainty (when the kinds of possible events and their probabilities are known). Maybe I should read something by the brother of LvM... Quote[/quote] Yes I'm not aware of any explicit treatments either. What I do find interesting with the above type of problem however
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[quote] The problem with real life is - it is never certain. And if there is even the slightest chance of, say, A breaking down before producing b, then the valuation of B will change. Dare to upgrade the puzzle? ;) [/quote] Of course, the permutations are endless! It's funny, I'm beginning to think it might be a good idea to make a book of