As the Commissariat consults the Planning, Inc. Chocolate Ration Futures Index

This review of a book I have not read, reviewed by lefty economics guy Daniel Davies, contains the following absolutely priceless aside about toy prediction markets like the IEM:

After all, if you can construct a Policy Analysis Market out of thin air and gain all the Hayekian advantages of information processing, why couldn’t the Central Planning Committee just set up a bunch of these “shadow markets” and run communism on the basis of the output?

Is it wrong that I immediately started sketching out a satirical science-fiction world in my head upon reading this?

The ensuing discussion also touches on the software-development obstacle to Technological Singularity that I mentioned earlier.

Reading level

kerri9494 talks about the problem of finding reading material for kids who read unusually well and therefore might not match the usual scaling of reading level with age interest of subject matter in children's books.

I was just thinking about this subject in connection with my visit to the new National Air and Space Museum building in Virginia. Some of the planes there evoked memories of a book on aircraft, a Penguin paperback with lots of colorful painted illustrations, that I had when I was very small. I think I first got it when I was in preschool, so I must have only been 4 or 5 at the time. I doubt I understood all the text in it at first, but I happily read it over and over, and it was probably written on about a fifth-or sixth-grade level by conventional standards. My parents got me other books that were obviously written for older kids, and I happily read them.

Yet when I was six or seven and we went to the library, to my parents' chagrin, I insisted on getting books only from the Easy shelf for little kids. Not only that, I checked the same ones out over and over. They were baffled that I kept wanting the same Dr. Seuss books.

I think it was partly what Kerri was talking about: books about airplanes were endlessly fascinating, but when it came to fiction, I just wasn't interested in the subject matter of stories written for older kids.

But it was also that I was a compulsive rule-follower. If a book was actually marked as being for people older than me, either in some indication on the cover or because of where it was shelved in the library, then, by gum, I wasn't going to cross that line. The books for kids outside my age range would probably be unhealthy for me somehow. Little did I realize what everyone in the children's publishing industry knows, that normal kids like the feeling that they're reading something skewed a little older than they are, and that books are usually labeled accordingly.

Come to think of it, I never really got into what would now be called YA fiction, all those books for twelve-year-olds about cool teenagers and their agonizing social issues. What happened after I graduated from the Easy shelf was that I got seriously into fantasy and science fiction, forgot all about reading levels, and didn't particuarly distinguish between Heinlein juvies, Tove Jansson Moomintroll books, and Isaac Asimov stories written for grownups. And after that there was a period in which I read mostly nonfiction.