** There is what Mohandas Gandhi himself preached; there are the things that rebels did in the name of the Mahatma--violently free political leaders from jail, tear up rail road tracks and engage in sabotage generally. See Shahid Amin of the Subaltern Studies School. *** on conformism generally I recently could not put down a short, intriguing book by Patrick Colm Hogan The Culture of Conformism. There are a couple of helpful reviews on the web. *** on price hunting, what are the search costs involved in finding the rock bottom price. I think Raghu has a point. People will look for the rock bottom price even when the search or personal costs as in the case of that stampede overwhelm the advantage from the price savings. This does seem to be an ideological problem. On the other hand, doesn't Stiglitz have a model that shows when search costs are high enough the model of perfect competition breaks down? **** Perhaps if the prisoner's dilemma, ultimatum game, tragedy of commons was taught the way in which Olstrom, Bowles and Gintis and others are trying to teach them, the econ students wouldn't so often turn out to be jerks? One day econ I students will also be taught more about environmental externalities, adverse selection in health insurance markets, the possibility of catastrophic positive feedback effects of asset deflation in a high leverage environment and disequilibrium dynamics generally (Cobweb dynamics and more), the historical and theoretical limitations of the two big models of Ricardian comparative advantage (US students should know that US policy was the opposite of what he recommend in the 19th century as shown by Ha-Joon Chang) and Walrasian general equilibrium theory (liked Jim's use of Koopmans), and the actual policies regulating the labor market (someone get an Econ I degree without knowing much about the labor market shifts outlined by NYT reporter Steven Greenhouse in his The Big Squeeze).
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