Updated Aug/13/2024 What is the liberal arts? The word arts means ‘subjects of study’ and today the word liberal in this context is usually taken to mean “wide-ranging” and “broad-minded”, but that wasn’t the original meaning of the term. The…
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Unions and the mafia
There is very little scholarly research about unions and organized crime according to an article and book I found on the topic. At this point the topic now seems unimportant because unions have been in decline in the USA and…
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
An individual who joins a multi-level marketing (MLM) company can make money by selling products directly to consumers AND more importantly by getting other people to become distributors at a lower level in the pyramid. In fact, even if nobody…
Posted in Managerial Micro
Milton Friedman was not a rational actor
The rational-actor paradigm came to dominate social sciences such as economics 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…
Posted in Medianism
Maurice Hilleman, millionaire superhero
Almost nobody has heard of Maurice Hilleman, but everyone should know his name. As Radiolab said, “his work is estimated to save about 8 million lives a year… he was the greatest scientist of the 20th century… We live longer…
Posted in Millionaire Superheroes
Interest rates are low because of demographic changes and rising corporate power
Greg Mankiw wrote in the NYT about the puzzle of persistently low interest rates. Interest rates have been lower than ever before in history and they have been very low for decades so low interest rates seems to be the…
Posted in Macro, Managerial Micro
Medianism 