Economics
29 posts · all topics
Another difference between China and the rest of the world
From Evan Osnos’ new book Age of Ambition, quoting the work of Yingiang Zhang and Tor Eriksson: They found that in other developing countries, parents' education was the…
What's worth reading in the news?
We like to think that, of course, keeping up with the news is important. “Citizens of a democracy need to stay informed about current events.” But how well…
[podcast] The Second Machine Age
My favorite podcast, Econtalk, is always worth a listen. Here are my takeaways from this week’s interview with Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT and co-author of The Second Machine…
The real reason for the 40-hour work week
Why do Americans work Monday through Friday and take weekends off? Labor unions say we should thank the rise of organized labor in the early 20th century, whose…
[book] The Goal
This book came recommended by none other than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and he’s right: it’s one of the better business books I’ve ever read. Written in a…
Why they failed: Zeo, Green Goose, 100Plus
Zeo was, for many of us, our favorite QS company : great, consumer-oriented low-cost hardware that measured something useful (sleep) to give insights we couldn't have had otherwise.…
Are public schools better than private?
The Atlantic has a short interview with University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign professors Sarah Theule Lubienski, and her husband Christopher A. Lubienski: “a new book argues that public…
Charts of RAW data
The Density Design Lab at Politecnico di Milano just released a cool new (free) web site , called RAW, for very simple data visualization. It’s roughly similar to…
Krugman on Microsoft and Apple
Paul Krugman is mostly correct: Back in the 80s, Microsoft and Apple both had operating systems to sell; Apple’s was clearly better. But Apple misunderstood the nature of…
Comparing China and 70’s high-growth Japan
Interesting chart via Financial Times Alphaville from a presentation by C.H. Kwan at Nomura's Institute of Capital Markets Research: The right-hand column (ICOR – incremental capital output ratio)…
[book] Daniel Pink on Selling
Business author Daniel Pink first impressed me on an Econtalk episode a few years ago with his ideas about what motivates people (the subject of his book Drive…
Decentralization in the ancient world
The Terra Cotta warriors of ancient Xi’an are an impressive legacy of the early centuries BC, and they better be: during that period, something like 10% of the…
Mike Daisey and the fight to keep people in crummy jobs
I listened to the riveting This American Life podcast retracting its January episode "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs", featuring the dramatist Mike Daisey, who misrepresented himself…
Coming apart from my children
Americans during my lifetime are becoming unequal and divided, not by class or income, but by something much more serious: a difference in values and interests. This has…
Gregory Slayton on Innovation
Dartmouth Tuck School of Business Adjunct Professor Gregory W. Slayton was in Beijing this month to give some talks about innovation. Although creativity and innovation are of course…
Worse than a robot
I’m back in the US for a few days, a good time to order items that I can’t get in China, and that means borrowing the address of…
Don’t study engineering or science
Thomas Friedman writes today in his column, One Country Two Revolutions if one result of the downsizing of Wall Street is that more of America’s best and brightest…
Anonymous Exchange
Human progress depends on specialization, which in turn requires successful cooperation, often among people far away and unknown to each other, referred to by the economist John Nye…
Digital socialism = capitalism.
In the Jun 2009 issue of Wired, Kevin Kelly uses the loaded term "socialism" to describe how the fragmentation of everything is giving us access to more choice…
Worst economy since the Great Depression
From the Jan 13th issue of Time Magazine: The slump is the longest, if not the deepest, since the Great Depression. Traumatized by layoffs that have cost more…
Greenspan Recants (or did he?)
The current financial crisis is an interesting real-life experiment to free market fans like me. It’s far too early to draw conclusions, but much of the generally accepted…
Reichert said no to the bail-out
Mercer Island’s congressman, Dave Reichert, voted against the $700B bail-out of the financial industry. A bunch of my friends are getting ready to jump out windows over this…
Robert Shiller and the Subprime Solution
With an endorsement from Nassim Taleb on the cover of his new book , and a mention in an excellent Econtalk podcast last week, I just had to…
Taleb thoughts on the financial crisis
I already told you that The Black Swan is among the best idea books I have ever read, and I find it even more interesting when I look…
Chasing the relative decline in Mercer Island incomes
One of the many ways people get frustrated with me is that I have a very skeptical view of statistics. Numbers are so easy to manipulate -- and…
Why you should not vote
Newsweek calls them "Low Info Voters" , the people who don't know or apparently care what issues are at stake in an election. They base their preferences on…
Coffee shops and women
Caitlin Knowles Myers from the Middlebury College Economics Discussion Grou p reported last September on a study of about 300 transactions at Boston-area coffee shops concluding that female…
Are we in a recession?
Everything I know about macro-economics I learned in classes from my old finance professor Jeremy Siegel , so I basically trust everything he says, and he says no…
Forecasting Global Warming
Image no longer available Scott Armstrong is a professor of marketing at Wharton who I remember as the geeky Decision Sciences instructor. He's an expert on forecasting, an…