Topic
economics
- Comfort with Contradiction
From my latest issue of Res Extensa: One of the most important things we can teach our children as they're coming of age is to cultivate a comfort with contradiction. Sometimes good things come at the expense of other…
- Will Milei Succeed In Argentina Marginal Revolution
Tyler Cowen is hopeful (as am I), but skeptical: For a country to swing so wildly from state-run strangulation to an quasi-populist libertarian economist makes me worried his effect on Argentine bureaucracy will fade…
- Will Milei Succeed in Argentina?
Tyler Cowen is hopeful (as am I), but skeptical: I have two major worries. First, if Milei approaches fiscal success, the opposing parties will think long and hard about whether they wish to enable further success. Or…
- Devon Zuegel on Inflation, Argentina, and Crypto
Argentina has become infamous for its decades-long struggles with inflation and economic instability. For an otherwise fairly well-off nation, it's surprising to outsiders how deep the problem on this has been. In thi…
- Regionalizing Renewable Energy
With the ongoing energy crisis happening in Europe, Anton Howes has some interesting ideas on how the Euro nations could convert the short-term pains of fossil fuel shortfall into a long-term surplus based on a mix of…
- Economies of Scale in Construction
In his newsletter, Brian Potter started a new series looking at why the construction industry seems to lack economies of scale, like you find in IT, media, and nearly every manufacturing business. When you look at the…
- Weekend Reading: Koestler on Awareness, 21st Century Alchemy, and the Gini Coefficient
🔮 The Nightmare That Is a Reality In early 1944, journalist Arthur Koestler was onto the horrors of the Holocaust taking place in Europe. He wrote this essay, originally published in the New York Times, calling atten…
- Weekend Reading: American Growth, JTBD, and Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
📉 Summary of The Rise and Fall of American Growth Concise summary of Robert Gordon's book on Roots of Progress. 👨🏻‍🏫 Guide to Jobs to be Done Interviews A solid comprehensive, step-by-step overview of how to condu…
- Second and Third-Order Effects
From Mark Levinson's The Box, on the shipping container and its impact on global trade: The true importance of the revolution in freight transportation would be found not in its effect on ship lines and dockworkers, b…
- 2020 Bundles
Ben Thompson follows up his 2017 piece with an update on the state of bundling strategies from some of the big tech and media companies. I liked this description of where Disney+ fits into Disney's overall strategy wi…
- Weekend Reading: Guide to SaaS, a Few Rules, and Starting a Company Now
📕 Stripe’s Guide to SaaS Stripe Atlas has a great batch of guides on various parts of company-building. 📜 A Few Rules Some great random clippings from Morgan Housel. I’m currently reading his latest, The Psychology…
- Economics of the Tour de France
The Tour is on its second rest day, 15 stages into a brutal 3 weeks of hills, mountains, and even challenging "easy days." I've followed the sport pretty closely over the past 6 years, but not too far into the busines…
- On Legibility
I think I probably read three different pieces this week alone that reference James Scott's Seeing Like a State. It presents an argument about the desire for "legibility" that overthrows and reorders bottom-up, emerge…
- Science, Innovation, and Longevity
This conversation with José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente on Erik Torenberg's podcast was an expansive cover of more topics than I think I've ever heard discussed on a single podcast. A brief sampling of the subje…
- Weekend Reading: Quarantine Talks
🛠Attitudes, Aptitudes, and Progress Joel Mokyr’s talk on the most recent session of The Torch of Progress series. 🧠How to Be a Neo-Cartesian Cyborg A recent talk from Maggie Appleton on the "building a second brai…
- Advantage Flywheels
A helpful resource here for understanding flywheels, the "causal loops" of different types of businesses. The reference examples show how the most successful companies ramp up the gear ratio by combining multiple flyw…
- The Torch of Progress with Tyler Cowen
This is the second episode of the "Torch of Progress" series that the Progress Studies for Young Scholars program is putting on, hosted by Jason Crawford. Tyler Cowen is unbelievably prolific in projects he's got goin…
- Weekend Reading: Post-Truth, Knowledge, and Game Graphics
⚖️ The Way Out of Post-truth Another razor sharp analysis from Gurri: The collapse of trust in our leading institutions has exiled the 21st century to the Siberia of post-truth. I want to be clear about what this mean…
- Martin Gurri on EconTalk
I've been following Gurri's work closely since I read The Revolt of a Public a couple months back. I think he's one of the sharpest minds we have right now thinking and writing about what's going on in politics, media…
- Weekend Reading: Optionality, Pangaea, and Regulatory Disappointment
⚖️ The Trouble with Optionality A 2017 commencement address from Mihir Desai, critiquing the phenomenon of infinite optionality and lack of commitment pushed by modern universities: I’ve lost count of the number of st…
- Did We Lock Down Some Places Too Early?
As the country is becoming more and more anxious about ending COVID lockdowns (with some states opening while others rein further in), Tyler Cowen had an interesting post about the timing of lockdowns: Let’s say you h…
- Weekend Reading: Tagging with Turf, Mars Panorama, and Kinds of Easy
🗺 turf-tagger Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser. 🚀 Mars Curiosity Hi…
- Back to the Future
New York Times writer Ross Douthat has a new book out called The Decadent Society, which explores how we've arrived in a period of (in the book's terms) stagnation, repetition, sterility, and sclerosis. This post is a…
- How Elite Institutions Lost Their Legitimacy
A discussion between economist Arnold Kling and author Martin Gurri about the erosion of institutions and what that means for polarization and cultural instability. Martin Gurri doesn’t like to make predictions. But i…
- Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complements
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately on our strategic objectives — where we are today, where we want to be in a few years, and the tactics in between to navigate us to a long-term maximum (and hopefully avoid comp…
- Adam Smith, Loneliness, and the Limits of Mainstream Economics
This is an essay from EconTalk's Russ Roberts with some takeaways from Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It's a book on topics like altruism and what drives human morality, and it's clear that much of what…
- 41 Inconvenient Truths
In the spirit of honesty and "data driven" thinking, this piece from the FEE has some eye-opening numbers on global energy usage, renewables, and the economics of the energy sector. I'd place myself in the category of…
- Hong Kong Is Fast Becoming an Also Ran
I don't follow international markets closely enough to keep up with this, but interesting to see this take on Hong Kong's relative stagnation in recent years, especially as compared to other nearby mainland China citi…
- Extreme Aging
From Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution: As a country, Japan is aging not just because it’s people are getting older but because it’s birth rate is well below replacement. This year there will be fewer than 900,000…
- Weekend Reading: Tradeoffs, the Margins, and PR FAQs
⚖️ Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making Farnam Street: Time is our most fundamental constraint. If you use an hour for one thing, you can’t use it for anything else. Time passes, whatever we do with it. It seems…
- Accidental Harm
This piece resonated in the wake of the mess around California's AB5 "AB5") legislation, which puts limitations on classifying workers as independent contractors. The backlash to AB5 shows how it's a case study in uni…
- Rory Sutherland on Alchemy
This is a great conversation from EconTalk with advertising exec Rory Sutherland on his new book Alchemy. He's got interesting ideas on the role of psychology and human emotion when it comes to decision making, market…
- What Gets Expensive, and Why?
Patrick Collison poses and tracks possible responses to broad questions on his website. In one, he asks: Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? Spending on healthcare in the US is up 9X in real terms s…
- Weekend Reading: Iceland, the Use of Knowledge, and CLI Search
⚖️ The Use of Knowledge in Society I've been reading some of Hayek's famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a cent…
- Ray Dalio on Career, Market Cycles, China Debt
A great long-form conversation with Ray Dalio on his experiences and thoughts on the current state of economic conditions and relationships. I'm in progress reading Principles, which I find interesting, but perhaps a…
- Weekend Reading: Wind Turbines, Bruce Sterling, and Economic Ideas
⚡️ The US Wind Turbine Database Ben Hoen from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab gave a lightning talk at Geo2050 about this project, a map and database of the operational wind generation capacity in the US. The map c…
- Economics & Product Management
A continuous challenge in product development (perhaps the ultimate challenge) is the balancing of many wants and needs with an inability to have everything. You never have the resources to build everything you want i…
- How the Economic Machine Works
Learn the foundations of how an economy works, in only 30 minutes. This piece from Ray Dalio (hedge fund manager and author of Principles and hedge fund manager) breaks down an entire Econ 101 class in a concise, grap…
- Weekly Links: Tensor Processing, Amazon, and Preventing Traffic Jams
Google's "Tensor Processing Unit" 💻 Google has built their own custom silicon dedicated to AI processing. The power efficiency gains with these dedicated chips is estimated to have saved them from building a dozen ne…