COVID-19’s Creative Destruction
“Creative destruction refers to the incessant product and process innovation mechanism by which new production units replace outdated ones. Over the long run, the process of creative destruction accounts for over 50 per cent of productivity growth.” – Joseph Schumpeter,…
Operation Warp Speed – the Last Mile Problem
I’ve spent the last month as a Peace Corps volunteer deployed to support a mobile vaccination clinic in rural Maine. The mission is to reach underserved communities to make it as convenient as possible for everyone to get the shot….
Who Shot the Sheriff? (of Nottingham)
When I got back to the states in March, walking through an airport that seemed to have suffered a neutron bomb strike, I knew life would be different for a while. It wondered what manner of distractions would appeal to…
Social Capital and Social Distancing
Most of us have worked in high performance teams at some time. Those were the teams that took pride in doing what others said was impossible, where debate was open and energized and sometimes at high volume, where decisions were…
Walking With Virus
I live in the city. My neighbors are out walking. Not just a few but lots of them. Most are walking alone or at most two abreast. They walk slowly, without purpose, as if they have no place to go….
The Labor Constraint
A few years ago I managed an NGO that served 20,000 subsistence farmers in Mali. I was surprised when I first arrived to find many of our farmers planting less than half their land. They might have 10 hectares but…
The Internet and the Long Tails of Political Discourse
Nearby is a graph of a standard normal frequency distribution. It was created with a random number generator but these types of distributions are also very common in nature. For example, if you count the kernels on the cobs from…
Voter Suppression in San Francisco
Some years ago, before I moved back to Africa, the local ballot in San Francisco had a measure to allow non-citizens to vote in school board elections. At the time, I thought it was another prank proposition like naming the…
Ebola: The View from 3° 30’ South
I moved to Burundi in February. I work for a small company providing training and micro credit to 30,000 subsistence farmers. Recently, I spoke with several Burundian friends about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. I asked them if they…
The Sources of Inequality
All men are created equal but they do not stay that way for long. As they age the dispersion of incomes increases dramatically. So there are two questions here. Why does this happen and is it a problem? A couple…