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…
Blog Archives
Racial progress: compare the riots of 1967 with the riots today. We’ve come a long way baby.
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…
The addictive dangers of modernity
For all the millennia of history before modern times, humans had very few options for entertainment and recreation. Food was bland, drugs were scarce, more time was spent making music than listening to it, and most social interaction was done…
Ikigai
In 2017-18 there was an ikigai fad in the West. Several new books were simultaneously published and numerous news articles were written. Even the World Economic Forum got caught up in the fad and published an article about it. Ikigai…
Posted in Labor
This month may be the best time in history to look for a job!
One of the oddities of the macroeconomy is the fact that GDP falls wildly every year in the beginning of winter. That means that there is a kind of recession every winter. It isn’t an official recession because everyone expects…
Medianism 