Give Your Money Away

Most econobloggers, myself included, find it hard enough to drink from the firehose of current information. (My RSS reader currently has 7,148 unread items.) But Mark Thoma, econoblogger extraordinaire, not only seems to manage to keep up on current news and debates, but also manages to find utter gems like this one, an essay by Joan Robinson from 1936. Go read it. Among many other things, it more or less explains the existence of 90% of the Wall Street Joural's editorial page long before that ignoble institution existed in its present form. What's more, the lucidity of the prose puts essentially all of today's professional economists to shame. The basic gist is that the rich use economics – or, more to the point, economists – to delude themselves that they shouldn't give their money away.

Coincidentally, Barry Ritholtz reprints a Tom Toles cartoon wherein the WSJ editorial page runs a story headlined "Rich Insufficiently Rich, Study Proves". After 71 of the most momentous years in human history, nothing has changed.

If you want another reason to give away your wealth, try being rich on a cruise ship in a storm. The biggest and most expensive cabins tend to be the highest up, where the movement and the seasickness is the greatest. And along similar lines, Yves Smith has found a Popular Mechanics survey which shows that on airplanes, first-class seats are by far the most dangerous to sit in. If you're in a plane crash and sitting at the back of the plane, your chances of survival are 69%. At the front of the plane, they're 49%.

But what if you want your wealth in order to buy Chris Dillow's new book? Well, it turns out that you shouldn't buy it after all.

So, what are you waiting for? If you need a good destination for your cash, you could do a lot worse than to start here.