In We Will Never Run Out of Oil I argue against calculations that oil will "run out" in some specific year:

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My original piece: Bottled Water Bans and Substitution Effects.

EclectEcon asks a number of questions as well, but gets to the heart of the matter with:

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One piece of human behavior that does not fit well into mainstream economics view of decision making is voting. Voting, on the surface, seems to be a wholly irrational act - the chance that your vote is going to make a difference in the outcome is so infinitesimally small that it is not worth the opportunity cost of the time spent.

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I was talking with a group of economists and finance professors lately and we were trying to determine what are the characteristics between investments, gambles, speculation and insurance. Using the dictionary definitions of the terms provides surprisingly little insight to real world cases.

Consider the following example:

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