Our Mountain of Silver
When the Spanish explored the new world in search of riches, they eventually reached what is now Bolivia and found a veritable mountain of silver. The flow of gold and silver to Spain from Cerro Rico (pictured) and other mines…
Executive Order 14036
On July 9th, the Biden Administration issued Executive Order 14036, “Promoting Competition in the American Economy. It takes a “whole of government” approach to improve our free market capitalist system. Citing the trust busting of Teddy Roosevelt and the New…
The Taxman Returns
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing. – Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s Finance Minister, 1665 The most recent $2 trillion tax…
A Return of that Other Bubble?
I was working on Wall Street during the crash of October 19, 1987, when the Dow dropped 22% (or about 7,000 points in today’s market). That evening, traders gathered at Harry’s Bar to commiserate. One of the old timers pulled…
The Stimuli and the People
Given the intense political animus on display in Washington in recent weeks, it is hard to imagine any rational policy agenda emerging from the chaos. The optics of a new president being installed with thousands of federal troops standing by…
Greenback Boogie
“Money is the mother’s milk of politics” – Jesse M. Unruh, 1966 Each day I get more than 20 requests for money from both political parties. The friendly missives come via text and email. Happily, they haven’t discovered my WhatsApp…
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…
Candidate Intersectional Rankings*
It is common practice in today’s political environment to carefully profile the essential nature, or intersectionality, of the candidates to establish a fundamental sense of their legitimacy. This encompasses not only the legitimacy of their political beliefs, but, more broadly,…
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…