Don’t confuse familiarity with understanding. That’s perhaps the biggest takeaway from Diane Coyle’s short and highly readable GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. The official guidance for calculating GDP, the System of National Accounts (SNA), published by the...
Silicon Valley and venture capital (VC) in the technology sector always offended this Midwesterner’s conservative sensibilities. Having come of age during the dotcom boom, I’m skeptical every time a technological shiny thing catches the public’s attention, which...
We’ve all had jobs that at times felt unnecessary, redundant, or even harmful. David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018) provides numerous examples of such jobs such as “flunkies” who exist only to make others feel important and whose examples include some receptionists...
Path dependence is the phenomenon often used to explain why people sometimes persist with practices that are no longer optimal or economically rational. Statistics is another area where path dependence has struck. The statistical techniques that students learn in...
Blockchains are simultaneously feared as a disruptive threat and lauded as a technological panacea, often with little understanding of how they actually work and often with little practical consideration of how they might be implemented. Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott...
Overlooking or underestimating obvious dangers is a timeless tradition. A man is terrified of planes but gets in his car every day and drives with no seat belt. A woman pays the fire insurance premium on her home religiously but doesn’t floss her teeth. People play...
Geography is destiny. Demography is second. Everything else is a distant third. That’s the takeaway from Peter Zeihan’s The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder, which was the book of the month for the...
Extraordinary central bank interventions during economic crises aren’t new. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lords of Finance, Liaquat Ahamed mentions Emperor Tiberius injecting one million gold pieces into the Roman economy to keep it from collapsing in 33 AD. ...
