Not really an exception

Markets failures are to market law as hydrogen globes are to gravity law.

We all save lives

I meet this guy and he says: "My work is to save lives. I'm a doctor". I answer: "Great! Mine too is to save lives!". He says: "Are you a doctor too?". I answer: "No, I'm an economist". He sees me frowning. I explain:

"An economist job is, for instance, to tell people how the economy is faring. This helps people to take decisions; in particular decisions related with the best way to finance colleges where medicine is taught, to finance profitable colleges and to shut down unprofitable ones. Other people decides on hiring or firing doctors, or on how to invest funds in order to pay hospital rolls.

By the way, all other people too helps in saving lives: the security officer outside the hospital, the traffic officer in the streets which helps doctors and security officers to arrive on time to their jobs, the man who sells the yachts which are the reason why some doctors decide to work at night, etc.

The fact that we only see the clock hands but not the pinions or ratchets are not an argument at all to conclude that only the hands are instrumental to allow a clock to work."

So, yes the doctor helps to save lives. He is the last part of a process not designed (and not designable!) by anyone but which nevertheless works. But as long as the doctor has a claim to say that he saves lives, anyone else has it too.

My summary of Knight's "Risk Uncertainty and Profit"

There is not such a thing as "systematic uncertainty". That's an oxymoron.

An ex-post zero sum game

The utmost feature of a forward commitment (forward, future, swap, etc.) is that ex-post if one party wins, the other party losses, ceteris paribus.

Market failure

If you find that markets fail, that's a proof of you lacking reading.

Intelligence and God

More intelligence is required to believe in God than to to be an atheist.

Time is a mere informational topic

Future is future only and as long as we are ignorant about it.

As long as we arrive at the logical mechanics of a system that system becomes for us in an eternal present.

Put another way: it is not merely that time is related to information. From the viewpoint of human thought, time is entirely an informational phenomenon. Uncertainty is not a feature of future, it is its essence. There where you don't find uncertainty, you don't have a future whatsoever.

There is not such a thing as time on the one hand and information on the other. There's only a one, un-separated, phenomenon: timeformation.

Two sorts of arbitrage

There are both commercial and productive arbitrage.

Commercial arbitrage is the typically-seen arbitrage consisting in buying cheap and selling dear commodities without incurring in transaction costs.

Productive arbitrage occurs always that there is a difference between the value of a finished good on the one hand, and a set consisting of an input plus a transaction expenditure on the other. In this sense, it is the most convenient to conceive of the set of inputs as a synthetic, such as the term is used in finance.

Since productive arbitrage is less obvious and require expectations on more issues, it is conceivable that there is easier to find businesses opportunities this way.

Productive arbitrage is the reason behind producing.

Always that the ratio between output and inputs through production is perceived as different from the price ratio between these two sets of commodities which can be expected to be achieved in the market, a decision to change the current level of production will occur.