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All of A Kaleberg's Comments + Replies

Why We Age, Part 2: Non-adaptive theories
A Kaleberg00

An even more interesting question is "Why are juveniles smaller than their parents?" It was raised by Ellistrand in a 1983 paper.

It isn't clear that aging is something under evolutionary pressure. This may be what evolutionary theorists call a "spandrel" situation. It's more about structure and mechanism, that is the shape of the landscape, than optimization in that landscape.

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5willbradshaw
Isn't it fairly obvious why juveniles are smaller? They have to fit inside the mother, or inside an egg which had to fit inside the mother. Even if the egg could potentially grow, you're limited by the energy reserves you started with until you hatch and find more. Staying in the egg also seems very dangerous (can't hide or run away from predators, can't move away if temperature/water/etc levels aren't good, etc). I can't tell whether or not your second paragraph is disagreeing with anything I said in my post.
5philh
Perhaps I'm missing the point, but doesn't "because the juvenile needs to fit inside at least one parent" mostly suffice as an answer?
The EMH Aten't Dead
A Kaleberg-20

The efficient market says that the market price reflects "all available information". That's tautological, and it's hard to argue with tautologies. The problem is that trades are made by people or algorithms designed by people. Different people have different tolerances for risk, different ideas about market performance and different strategies for making money. What does it even mean for a price to reflect all available information? A lot of that information is embedded in people's minds and situations and in our institution struc... (read more)

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The Oil Crisis of 1973
A Kaleberg120

LBJ's guns (Vietnam) and butter (Great Society) were already causing a lot of inflationary pressure. Nixon imposed wage-price controls in 1971 around the time he took us off Bretton-Woods. I gather the Fed was raising interest rates, but not enough to slow an economy with that level of rising inflation. Wage price controls were considered, depending on your politics and probably the time of day, socialism or war-time measures. B-W was a good post-WWII idea that helped the post-war recovery, but as in the 1930s, gold standards never work as well in pra... (read more)

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4quanticle
The Fed, at the time, was not raising interest rates because it was thought that the political cost of a recession caused by raising interest rates would be too high. Nixon favored keeping interest rates low. Ford was basically a caretaker government. Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve, in 1979. Volcker immediately raised the Fed funds rate to 20% to curb inflation. In the process, however, he triggered a short but deep recession which contributed to Carter being a one-term President, thus proving the point.