Peter Singer’s book called The Life You Can Save is about one of his most famous thought experiments: Suppose on a walk you notice a young girl drowning in a lake. If you can swim, and you can save her…
Blog Archives
Do we have a responsibility to develop more millionaire superheroes?
Posted in Millionaire Superheroes, Philosophy and ethics
How the reality-show president created a social movement by leveraging new technology to take advantage of our psychological weaknesses
Netflix has a great documentary called The Social Dilemma about how social media companies are using algorithms and artificial intelligence to manipulate and addict us in order to make money. They might not have developed artificial intelligence to the point…
Posted in Pence2018
Slavery was a core part of civilization for most of history
Anarchists are hard to find nowadays, and scholars who advocate anarchy are extremely rare, but James C. Scott is one such scholar and his work is excellent even if I disagree with his anarchist leanings. Although his work is highly…
Posted in Development
Unions and the mafia
There is very little scholarly research about unions and organized crime according to the article and book I found on the topic. It may be that the topic now seems unimportant because another article said that the mafia wasn’t particularly…
Posted in Labor
Why buy a lotto ticket when other kinds of gambling are much more profitable?
The lottery is much less efficient than most form of gambling than most because each lottery ticket has an expected loss of more than 50% after taxes whereas slot machines have an expected loss of only about 10% and the…
Posted in Labor
How pyramid schemes work
Gaby Del Valle investigated multilevel marketing companies and found. According to the Direct Selling Association, the multilevel marketing (MLM) industry’s lobbying arm, one in six American households is involved in the industry. Most MLM salespeople don’t make a ton of money —…
Posted in Managerial Micro
Milton Friedman was not a rational actor
The rational-actor paradigm came to dominate economic thinking in the mid-20th century. It assumes that people are selfish and try to rationally maximize their self-interest without regard for the effects on people around them. Critics sometimes call it the rat-actor…
Posted in Medianism
