When I was an adolescent in Buenos Aires, we Jewish boys all battled unsolvable identity issues. Being a Jew was a most problematic identity, no one knew how to deal with it. Now I see that the French had caught the Galuth neurosis: this book tells the story of a French girl with some nebulous Algerian ancestry, who "returns" to Algeria to fill in the silences of her parents. Not long ago, the French had a solid idea of themselves and what they were, but now everything is mixed up and no one knows who he/she is. They are suffering and unhappy, and trying to work out their identities by writing books. As for me, Zionism dissolved any complex I may have had, and my children are free of this mental disease. 
We model a market for a skill that is in short supply and high demand, where the presence of charlatans (professionals who sell a service that they do not deliver on) is an equilibrium outcome. We use this model to evaluate the standards and disclosure requirements that exist in these markets. We show that reducing the number of charlatans through regulation decreases consumer surplus. Although both standards and disclosure drive charlatans out of the market, consumers are worse off because of the resulting reduction in competition amongst producers. Producers, on the other hand, strictly benefit from the regulation, implying that the regulation we observe in these markets likely derives from producer interests.
by Robert Day.One of the big issues that exercises everyone is leakage. Ofwat looked at this dispassionately, as you might expect. The thing is that it costs pretty much the same to fix a leak whether it’s a pinhole or a major mains burst; so we evolved a measure called the “economic level of leakage” (ELL). This was the level of leakage where it was actually cheaper to bring a new water source into supply to compensate for leakage losses than it is to actually go out and track down and repair every leak. We commissioned some research into public perceptions on this matter, and it taught me something important about public opinions. We (well, the consultants we got to do this for us) put together a focus group and asked them “Should all leaks be fixed, irrespective of cost or size of leak?” and then looked at how many people agreed with that. They were then briefed about the ELL measure, with worked examples to explain the concept in terms that anyone could understand. The focus groups were even asked if they understood what they’d been told, and nearly everyone said “Yes”. And then they were asked the original question again – should all leaks be fixed regardless? And despite everything that had been done to explain it, almost exactly the same number of people as before said “Yes”. People prefer their firmly-held beliefs to clear and incontrovertible facts.
Volatility is a statistical measure of the dispersion of returns for a given security or market index. Volatility can either be measured by using the standard deviation or variance between returns from that same security or market index. Commonly, the higher the volatility, the riskier the security.What does it mean "commonly"? As for me, volatility is risky only for the investor that is forced to cash its share at a certain date. If the investor is free to wait out the low cycle (the price tends to regress to the mean, doesn't everything?) and he has patience - sigma is no risk at all.
