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…
The Fed: Love Minus Zero/No Limit
In the dime stores and bus stations People talk of situations Read books, repeat quotations Draw conclusions on the wall Some speak of the future My love she speaks softly She knows there’s no success like failure And that failure’s…
The Incorporeal Economy
In October 2006, Netflix launched a contest. They offered a $1 million prize to any team that could improve their movie-recommendation software engine by 10%. Netflix’s global hackathon eventually engaged 30,000 engineers loosely organized and endlessly re-organized into hundreds of…
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…
The Central Planners and the Virus
“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” …
Crossing the Political-Economic Divide
How do entrepreneurs assess political risk? Other than Mark Zuckerberg, do they even think about it? Are technology companies and social networks on the side of the populists? Division is in the air. Everything I read and everything I hear…
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…
Surveillance Economics
…or Why Does My Barber Have an App? Does my barber need an app? Contemplating that question opened up an intriguing can of worms… One of the more difficult aspects of economic analysis is…
How Much Green for this Deal?
When I was a leftist radical some decades ago in Berkeley, I joined in many late-night to early morning discussions about the woes of the world. The Vietnam War was raging, we were all subject to the draft and none…
Between the Bubble and the Bitcoin Bitters
I recently read this item in the Wall Street Journal, “Nvidia misjudged how quickly prices for the graphics cards that those chips go into would normalize now that crypto currency mining isn’t as hot.” That seemed odd. For related posts…