Alternatives and Supplements: Fun on the Internet

Rationing and Allocating Price as a Rationer Many non-economists do not understand that prices are a way of rationing. This article from AmosWeb explains why they are: www.amosweb.com/cgi-bin/awb_nav.pl?s=wpd&c=dsp&k=price+rationing Non-Price Rationing CyberEcononics explains rationing by coupon in the U.S. during World War II. Here is a site that look at rationing by coupons in the UK during World War II: www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/Homework/war/rationing.htm and here is one with a more detailed look at rationing in the US: www.ameshistoricalsociety.org/exhibits/events/rationing.htm Price Controls Government subsidized bread in Egypt has led to many problems, as this article in The New York Times explains: www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/world/africa/17bread.html Hugh Rockoff explains price controls in this long but informative entry in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PriceControls.html Rationing and the Distribution of Income Frank Levy, who is responsible for some very clever interactive graphs to which these pages of Alternatives and Supplements link, here writes about the distribution of income in the U.S. for The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: www.econlib.org/library/Enc/DistributionofIncome.html Prices: Incentives and Communication Device A blog at Economist.com talks about the importance of information in prices, with a lengthy quotation from Friedrich Hayek: www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/04/the_power_of_prices Maybe I should have given something from Wikipedia here because it seems that the economics of information coming from Hayek was a source of inspiration for Wikipedia: reason.com/news/show/119689.html Suppressing Market Information Here is an article that explains the Austrian point of view in the socialist calculation debate of whether a socialist economy could be economically efficient: the-idea-shop.com/article/97/the-socialist-economic-calculation-debate-and-the-austrian-critique-of-central-planning Dollar Voting An explanation of consumer sovereignty from The Quaker Economist: www.quaker.org/tqe/2003/TQE067-EN-Consumer.html Feedback What CyberEconomics calls destabilizing feedback is often called positive feedback. Except when it is called negative feedback. Confused? So is the The Wall Street Journal: blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/02/21/negative-feedback-on-economys-negative-feedback-loops/ A Self-Correcting System (I have not yet found a suitable entry here.)  These links were checked on July 5, 2008. Copyright Robert Schenk Why is this page here?