The Darwin economy 

Here's a talk by Robert H Frank on the ideas behind the book The Darwin economy (30 min lecture)

Synopsis

The Bull elk's antlers are to help in the elks individual reproduction advantage. The bigger your antlers are compared to your competitors, the better placed you are in securing a mating partner. 
But having such big antlers put the elk at a survival disadvantage when it comes to escaping from predators. It would be in all the elk's interests if they all had smaller antlers, as it doesn't matter how big your antlers are, just how big they are compared to your nearest competitor.

Politicians salaries and corruption
How much does political corruption have to do with the average politicians wage rather than generally well organised and less corrupt countries will tend to have more money because of that?
I have collated data from 21 countries included corruption perception, average weekly wage and politicians wages and tried to do some analysis.

Politicians salaries This graph shows politicians wages in the x axis and corruption perception on the y axis. Higher on the corruption perception index means less corrupt. There is weak correlation between politicians wages and corruption though there is still a slight correlation.

Average workers salaries

This graph shows average workers wages in the x axis and corruption perception on the y axis.

Taking in mind there are only 21 countries in this graph, there is a strong correlation between average workers wages and a perception of less corruption.

Does it make a difference if you increase the average politicians salary higher than the average population? This graph shows politicians wages minus the average workers wages in the same country on the y axis and corruption perception on the x axis. The trend is again weak, I have also created a graph showing politicians wages above workers wages as a percentage and a fraction and there is still no clear correlation at all.

Summary

There is no clear evidence in this data that higher politicians wages lead to less corruption perception. There is a high correlation between average wages and corruption where this could be a factor that less corrupt countries are better environments for more prosperous companies and people what will increase average wages.

Again there is little data showing that increasing politicians wages will combat corruption though we haven't looked into very low paid politicians compared to workers as they maybe more perceptible to corruption.

Again we have to remember this only included 21 countries and only goes off corruption perception and average wages doesn't directly translate into better organised companies.

What nets can be folded into a cube?
Not all nets of six squares can be folded up into a cube, such as a line of six squares, so is there anyway to know what nets can be folded up into a cube with a few simple rules? I am glad to say yes.

Find any point of the net where three squares meet. From this point draw three lines that goes across two squares but diagonally one. Remember where two squares meet you will have two vertices but the lines can't land on anything above three vertices If you can do this the net can be folded up into a cube.

Why across two and diagonally one?

Any point where three squares meet on the net would be the corner of the cube when folded, going across two squares and diagonally one would be the opposite corner of the cube. When the lines go across every square it shows it has to be able to fold into a cube. The lines do not have to go through every square though so how do we know the reminding square is in the correct position? I will not explain it here but you will find that it has to be in the correct position otherwise you would not be able to link three corners to three other vertices.

Deterministic paradox

The Deterministic Paradox — Can the Universe Know Itself?

Imagine you've built a swarm of nanobots. Their sole purpose: to scan every subatomic particle in the universe — position, momentum, spin — and from that complete snapshot, compute the future. Earthquakes. Stock markets. The random number you're about to think of. Everything, predicted.

This is essentially Laplace's Demon — the 19th-century thought experiment in which a sufficiently intelligent being, given perfect knowledge of every particle, could in principle calculate all future events. The nanobots are just a modern, more concrete version of the same idea.

Now I ask them a single question.

"What hand will I raise? You must tell me before I decide — and whatever you say, I will raise the other one."

If they say left, I raise right. If they say right, I raise left. If they stay silent, I raise whichever I like and their silence is a failed prediction. There is no correct answer.

At first glance this looks like a dressed-up version of the Liar Paradox — "This statement is false" — a sentence that undermines itself the moment you accept it. And the family resemblance is real. But I think this paradox points to something deeper.

The nanobots' problem isn't simply that they guessed wrong. It's that the act of telling me the prediction becomes part of the system they're trying to predict. The moment the output of the model enters the world, it changes the world the model was describing. The prediction is no longer about a closed system — it's about a system that now includes the prediction itself.

This is structurally similar to a result from computer science: Turing's Halting Problem. Turing proved in 1936 that no program can exist that reliably determines whether any arbitrary program will halt or run forever — because you can always construct a program that does the opposite of whatever the checker says. The checker, if it could exist, would contradict itself. The nanobots face the same trap.

There's also a connection to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems: any sufficiently powerful formal system contains true statements it cannot prove from within itself. A system complex enough to model reality in full cannot fully model itself as part of that reality without generating contradictions.

So what does this mean for determinism?

The nanobots might still predict the future of everything except a self-aware agent who knows the prediction and can act against it. This isn't about quantum randomness or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (though that adds another layer of infeasibility). It's a deeper problem: a deterministic system cannot make accurate real-time predictions about subsystems that are aware of and reactive to those predictions.

In other words — even in a perfectly deterministic universe with no quantum fuzziness — omniscience may still be impossible in practice, not because the universe is random, but because knowledge of the future, once introduced into a self-aware system, changes the future.

The universe might be a clockwork machine. But the clock can't read its own face

Stability in business
Business' want stability and profits, sometimes companies can put long term stability at risk due to the pressure on surviving in business. This is not necessarily business' fault just how economics works, it's similar to athletes who can put their long term health at risk by taking certain drugs to improve short term goals.

Retail and investment banks
Combining the retail banks and the investment banks adds greater risk to the whole economy if you potentially go under as everyone loses their money, the benefits for the company is using the money from the retail banks in the investment banks what is more profitable.

Any company that decide to combine both sides of the bank can make more profit and make better offers to customers. Even though decisions like these can make you more unstable in the long run, any company that decides not to combine both sides of the bank can be less profitable and is more likely to go out of business, so you will more likely see companies putting their stability at risk to survive in the short term.

Marxism and stability
Marx thought there was an inherit unsuitability running through the history of capitalism. One of his ideas was if bosses got their way and paid their workers less and less, then those workers would have less and less to buy what the bosses are selling, driving a decline in the economy. But a squeeze in workers earning doesn't always mean there will be a decline in the economy.

In the past workers got the money and bought the products as well as making the product, so a decline in wages meant a decline in demand. But when bosses have a larger share of the profits to spend they have more power on demand, so they can sustain the demand.

Housing
This effect can be seen in certain saturated housing markets, where the landlord is the boss and the tenant as the worker. 
So even when less people have buying power to own their own home, there are enough landlords to own the majority of the homes in the area and they are the ones who keep the housing market prompt up. And if home building is slow enough any new homes that are build will be consumed by these landlords.

2 flaws of capitalism
A barometer for any economic system's success is it's ability to increase happiness. Capitalism has been a successful system at increasing happiness, though it does come with flaws in it's purest form such as allowing monopolies and allowing companies to stifle competition. These types of problems are part of the two biggest problems in the most purest forms of capitalism.

Only thinking of your own interests

This is normally a benefit thinking of your own interests as it improves competition, but sometimes you are not the only person at risk from the actions you're taking. Imagine we allow companies to freely buy land, build a nuclear power station and have their own safety regulations. As a owner of the power station your risk is the profits of the power station, not of people who live around the power station. As you can see risk isn't just on the owner of the company and the people who buy the products.

Elk need larger antlers than their peers when fighting to find a mate, but the larger antlers actually make it harder to run away from predators, it would be in all their own interest if they all had smaller antlers as it doesn't matter how big the antlers are but how big they are to your nearest competitor.
This is the same case for certain companies when advertising, you have to spend more than your competitor on advertising but this hurts both your companies having to spend so much money on advertising, it would be in both your own interests to stop advertising in certain cases.

People not knowing what's in their best interest
There are two main reasons people make decisions that are not in their interest's. 

1. Lack of knowledge can make it hard to compare two products or to make a decision on if a product is right for you harder. To know if you are getting the best and appropriate healthcare can be difficult when you don't really know how to even compare what is a better healthcare plan. You may believe you have all the relevant information to make a decision but even then you can't be sure and it's in the companies interest to suppress information that would be harmful to it's profits.
2. We are not 100% rational beings, our brain's are wired up to want and act certain ways what can be detrimental for us and against our own interests, such as wanting to loose weight but having craving to eat more, wanting to stop smoking, etc. capitalism can play on our craving and the quirks of how our brain is wired up and actually make us more unhappy in the long run.