Introduction: This essay is guest authored by a group of pencils. Yes, we are a bunch of ordinary writing instruments. Even though any one of us is very dumb, even a group of idiots can produce something much greater than the…
Blog Archives
Marc Andreessen wants to put teachers out of work but he doesn’t know what he is talking about
Vox posted a series of interviews with Marc Andreessen in which the billionaire co-founder of Netscape seems to feel that most of the economy outside of silicon valley is simply backwards. …you have the sectors in which prices are rapidly…
Posted in Managerial Micro
Did we reach peak market circa year 2000?
For centuries, markets have been expanding into ever greater spheres of human life and displacing non-market human interaction. This has been an exciting time for economists because economists mostly just study markets. This has led economists to neglect major spheres of…
Capitalism rests on socialist foundations.
Yesterday I noticed that one of my colleagues, Dr. George Lehman, will be giving a presentation entitled, “Having it both ways: Costa Rica as an alternative to the capitalism-socialism debate.” George always gives interesting presentations and whereas I’ll probably agree…
The math behind whether condoms cause teen pregnancy
Via Sarah Kliff, I see that a new research paper found that schools giving out free condoms had a 10 percent increase in teen births. This is contrary to the past studies I have seen which show that free birth control led to fewer pregnancies…
Posted in Health, Managerial Micro
Anthropomorphizing Bill Gates as the God of Microsoft
It is human to anthropomorphize. We like to personify holidays into heroic figures like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny and personify companies as Ronald McDonald or the Michelin Man. The flourishing of art and culture of entire eras is…
Posted in Managerial Micro
Inequality decimates the heroes of the cult of the entrepreneur
Webster has two definitions of ‘entrepreneur’. The first definition is “a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money.” By this definition, high inequality creates a lot of entrepreneurs. Extremely poor people…
Medianism 