The costs in mining Bitcoin are not really per transaction. They are per block, and a block can include many transactions. The technology is also changing. It is wrong to assume more transactions imply more energy usage.
NYT tries to frame it as if the rules of science were unfairly changed. Not so - people had just been overly lax for a while. And sorry, NYT, but scientific knowledge is not a matter of opinions and goodwill. We can not simply decide her theories are true after all, because we empathize with her so much.
No, the rents are high because Munich has a lot of successful industries, like BMW. People in Munich have good incomes. Also, the region is very attractive to live in.
The "poverty line" in Germany is defined as "earning less than 60% of the average national income". It does not imply being starved for food.
Everybody in Germany is eligible for social benefits, which includes material things like paying the rent, health insurance and a certain amount of money to get though the month. The food banks make it easier to get through the month if you don't have much money, but they don't imply that people can't get by without them. Often articles about poverty in Germany forget to count in the free health care and free rent, which is worth a couple of hundred EUR at least. I bet many Americans would kill for having that kind of health care, in fact. Unemployed receive the same level of health care are everybody else.
Sometimes there are issues with bureaucracy, for example people are forced to move into a smaller flat even if their current larger flat is cheaper, because of regulations (benefits recipients can only have so much space or whatever). That sucks and needs to be remedied. Those are hiccups in the system, though, not a large scale phenomenon.
Also there are people who don't accept help, like homeless people with mental issues.
I understand the reasoning behind such regulation. On the other hand, for example doing a startup is also highly risky. Should it therefore also be regulated, only people with enough savings (and perhaps education) should be allowed to do startups?
I don't think it is easy to answer, clearly not allowing people to take risks is also taking away there freedom and chances for making a better living. Not allowing people to take risks (and consequently, start businesses) ultimately leads towards a communist worlds were people can only pick from a selection of government ordained jobs.
It's always pretty obvious that those are idealized abstractions, though. I don't understand the criticism of the rational actor model.
In the same vein, many people criticize economics for seemingly being obsessed with money. It is not, they just use it as a convenient proxy for value.
" In his highly popular “Principles of Economics,” Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw begins by listing a set of ten basic principles, which include “Rational people think at the margin,” “Trade can make everybody better off,” and “Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity.”"
That was and is a fine approach, nothing wrong with it. I think one of the principles was "people react to incentives" or something along the line. I think about it often. I think Mankiw's book is great (I have only read the German version, which might differ in details from the US version - for example it uses examples from Germany).
How do I know I can trust this "new economics" textbook? What if it was written by communists or some other ideological group?
I also don't agree that economics did a bad job explaining the 2008 crisis. It's just that people don't want to hear certain economic truths. Also, economists disagree on some things, so it seems odd to say "economics doesn't explain x" - some economists do, others don't.
I am skeptic of anybody whose approach to criticizing modern economics is the rational actor model. Economists know that it is just a model. It is still very useful, and even if real world actors are not rational in the short term, evolution ensures that actions are rational in the long term, for the most part.
All that said, in general of course it is great to make a free economics text book available.
