Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby wrote a wonderful article at Bloomberg with a set of maps showing land use in the USA. They did a great job of taking public datasets and displaying the information in a fun way that…
Blog Archives
The economics of residential density
Most Americans are used to low-density towns and suburbs and like them a lot. Many Americans have experienced unpleasant high-population-density places in America. In fact most of the high-density urban areas in the US were relatively unpleasant in recent US…
Posted in Public Finance, Real Estate
How to eliminate most of the inefficiency of doing taxes
Americans waste way too much time and money preparing their taxes. There is a much more efficient information-age technology that other nations use which eliminate the entire burden for most citizens. If I’m not itemizing deductions (like 70 percent of taxpayers),…
Posted in Public Finance
Why are we so afraid of other nations that can’t even take care of their own shit?
TomDispatch has a great article about the insanity of our military’s spending priorities and the money-grubbing paranoia of the associated defense-industrial complex. It is scary. You gotta read it. At the same time, all rich nations are military allies of…
Posted in Development, Public Finance
How to indebt future generations. Borrowing alone does not do it!
Private investors were begging governments to borrow more money in 2015. Interest rates were extremely low: Government debt cannot significantly be a significant burden when interest rates are that low. For example, when interest rates are zero, there is no…
Posted in Macro, Public Finance
The mistaken libertarian/anarchist theology underpinning bitcoin and other blockchain currencies
Ian Bogost writes that Cryptocurrency Might be a Path to Authoritarianism. You should read the full article for full effect, but he says that “Extreme libertarians built blockchain to decentralize government and corporate power,” but he warns that blockchain could…
Posted in Macro, Public Finance
The best marijuana policy is the least popular: decriminalization
Americans tend to be conservatives in the sense that we tend to be risk averse. We don’t want to change our system unless there is a really good reason. But we are embarking on a radical social experiment in marijuana…
Posted in Health, Public Finance
Medianism 