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…
Blog Archives
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
Racial progress: compare the riots of 1967 with the riots today. We’ve come a long way baby.
Read this classic Esquire essay from 1968. Police brutality was way worse back then. They just massacred people in some cases. White supremacist militias were more dangerous and shot more people. Entire neighborhoods burned for days. It was close to…
Posted in Discrimination, Violence & Peace
Black lives matter more in countries with fewer guns. Even most police don’t need guns.
As I’ve written before, I’m not a gun-control advocate because there are lots of other factors that can reduce violence that are more politically feasible. For example, Franklin Zimring has numerous suggestions for how to change the rules of engagement…
Posted in Discrimination, Violence & Peace
Prejudice is inefficient and often hurts the people with the prejudices — sometimes as much or more than their targets.
Inequality due to discrimination is inefficient and can even hurt the people at the top. For example, the slave states were economically backward and although the white elites were rich, they weren’t growing the size of their economy as much…
Posted in Discrimination, Inequality
Some basic economics of the covid-19 pandemic
In 2007, the St. Louis Fed summarized research about the 1918 influenza pandemic and used it to predict what would happen in a pandemic like the present covid-19 crisis. Their predictions have been pretty accurate. For example, the report predicted…
Medianism 