5 What Life Has to Offer - Fair Play: What Your Child Can Teach You About Economics, Values and the Meaning of Life by Steven E. Landsburg - #ricchezzaopportunità #preferenzerivelate #unitàdimisurauniversale #demonedellinvidia
5 What Life Has to OfferRead more at location 593
Note: Invidia e tassazione progressiva Costi opportunità: la vita ha tanto da offrire, le ns scelte dipendono dalle opportunità Insegnamento: ogni cosa che ci piace è il fruto di un genio che ha individuato un nuovo bisogno e lo ha soddisfatto in modo creativo In cortile in 3 Sei + arrabbiato o affaticato? La confrontabilità delle preferenze Edit
What I do believe—and this is an observation grounded in economics—is that the most valuable thing I can do for my daughter is to give her a sense of life’s possibilities, or (in the ugly jargon of my profession) of her opportunity set.Read more at location 635
I want her to know that the strategy for success in life is to identify a need and invent a way to fill it. No artist or inventor or entrepreneur ever achieved greatness by performing an old task in the old way.Read more at location 643
That lesson is not obvious to children; it needs to be taught. To an adolescent who got his summer job by filling out an application and having the good fortune to get selected from a large pool of essentially identical applicants, there is a temptation to overgeneralize and presume that the chairman of the General Motors Corporation got his job essentially the same way. It’s a parent’s job to combat that false impression and explain that corporate success, like success in general, comes to those who distinguish themselves from the crowd through the force of their creative vision.Read more at location 646
It’s the rarity of their skills that allows executives to earn as much as they do; if their skills were common, competition would bid their wages down.Read more at location 664
I want my daughter to understand all that, and more generally to know that, by and large, the way she’ll know when she’s doing something socially useful is that people will be willing to pay her to do it. Social usefulness is not the only appropriate goal in life, but it’s nice to have a way to recogize how you’re doing in that dimension.Read more at location 666
Cayley understands too, as, incredibly, many adults do not, that the reason there are homeless people is that—for whatever reason—some people prefer not to acquire homes.1 She scoffed when she heard a television commentator suggest that the problem is a “shortage” of housing; she’s old enough to understand that when people offer to buy houses other people will offer to build them.Read more at location 686
We took a walk in the woods together years ago, Cayley aged four, and her dad, and her friend Jessica, also four. Jessica discovered a beautiful feather, and Cayley discovered envy.Read more at location 700
Cayley—whose envy had been of the wistful, not the bitter, variety—knew already that when your friend finds a feather and you don’t, it’s better to be happy for your friend than sorry for yourself. But she was surprised when I told her this was a lesson many adults have yet to learn. She had never considered the possibility of taking Jessica’s feather by force, and was accordingly shocked when I told her about the progressive income tax.Read more at location 702
Whenever three of them meet on the playground, one ends up feeling left out. Cayley’s been through her share of those crises, and I’ve been through my share of vicarious heartache.Read more at location 707
Sometimes two other kids want to play with each other and not with you, and sometimes all you can do is learn to deal with it; learn to cope. You can’t force them to play with you, and even if you could it would be a bad idea.Read more at location 710
Hunger and fatigue had caught up with me one night, and my complaints led Cayley to ask whether I was more hungry or more tired. My initial reaction was to explain that the question made no sense, because hunger and fatigue are measured in entirely different, and incomparable, units. There is no common scaleRead more at location 727
But then I paused to reflect that in fact adults ask each other questions like this all the time,Read more at location 731
So we must have some innate instinct for converting our fundamental needs to a single one-dimensional scale.Read more at location 732
Unthoughtful adults have been known to insist that you can’t put a dollar value on love, or on the environment, or on human life—whichRead more at location 735
Deciding whether you’d rather preserve a rare species of monkey or have an extra $50 in your bank account is easy compared to deciding whether you’re more hungry or more tired.Read more at location 737
One listens carefully to one’s opponents not in order to win them over, but to see what one can learn from them.Read more at location 747
Note: IL DIALOGO
