My family toured the Washington DC monuments on Saturday and almost all of them are tributes to elite leaders or soldiers. There are very few monuments for the poor, but the Martin Luther King monument has quotes about the poor…
Blog Archives
Racism and The Achievement Gap
This summer, the entire Bluffton University faculty is reading a Ken Bain book as a focus for meetings about improving our teaching, and it has some sections that are relevant to the Bluffton civic engagement theme I mentioned in my…
Affirmative Action and Trayvon Martin
I find Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ writings about racism to be thoughtful and a useful perspective. I was surprised to read how sanguine he is about the Trayvon Martin verdict. I don’t know what we can do about racism and racial profiling…
Weekend Dimmeu: BornRich.com
This is the inaugural post for a series of occasional posts demonstrating the diminishing marginal utility (dimmeu) of wealth using common sense examples. BornRich.com is a voyeuristic website in the tradition of Lifestyles of The Rich and Famous that the…
Posted in Medianism
Walmart, Job Destroyer?
My former PhD advisor, Joseph Persky, published research a few months ago showing that a new Walmart in Chicago destroyed, “approximately 300 full-time equivalent jobs in nearby neighborhoods. This loss about equals Walmart’s own employment in the area.” Persky’s work…
The Monopoly Dilemma
The internet (and information technology) is often portrayed as a great leveler that democratizes power. This is one of the themes of Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book, The World Is Flat. It is true that the internet has leveled power in…
Posted in Managerial Micro, Public Finance
Small Is Ugly – Old Version
UPDATE: I posted a better version with more details. Click on the link. Most Americans work for someone else. Entrepreneurialism is rare. Would it be better for America if average firm size shrank and there were more, smaller firms? Economists…
Posted in Development, Macro
Medianism 