A call for more civil discourse
In his article on FEE, Steven Horowitz argues that a key to civil discourse is attempting to view the debate from the other side. It is all too easy to…
Kon-Tiki–a reminder of possible
(Janson Media) Kon-Tiki is the Academy Award-winning film of an astonishing adventure, a journey spanning 4,300 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean by raft. Intrigued by Polynesian folklore, Norwegian biologist…
21st century Chinatown?
Those who remember the 1974 classic film Chinatown will find this story eerily familiar. (ReasonTV) The Antelope Valley is a vast patch of desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles…
The virtues of competition
Orson Welles as Harry Lime in the film adaptation of Graham Greene’s Third Man. Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy…
A theory about the poor’s aversion to welfare
(The Economist) Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like…
Are sovereign islands the new frontier?
(Details) [Peter] Thiel spends a lot of time thinking about frontiers. “Way more than is healthy,” he admits. Not just financial frontiers, though that’s his day job: He cofounded PayPal,…
Juggernaut
This is a blog dedicated to economics, politics, and modern living. It is anchored by the theory in a recently published book titled Juggernaut: Why the System Crushes the Only…
Police and thieves in the street
by Junior Murvin Police and thieves in the street (oh yeah) Fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition Police and thieves in the street (oh yeah) Scaring the nation…
Economist soundtracks–Mises
One of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig von Mises, in the course of a long and highly productive life, developed an integrated, deductive…
The United States of America loses its AAA credit rating from S&P
(Reuters) The United States lost its top-notch AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor’s on Friday in an unprecedented reversal of fortune for the world’s largest economy. Read the S&P…
The plight of the middle class
Robert Reich connects the dots on the economy, in less than 2 minutes and 15 seconds. A number of questions arise, not the least important of which has to do…
Solving the problem by adding to it and making it worse
(The New York Times) There is something you should know about the deal to cut federal spending that President Obama signed into law on Tuesday: It does not actually reduce federal…
Life and times in the rentership society
(Bloomberg) The U.S. homeownership rate has fallen below 60 percent when delinquent borrowers are excluded, a sign of the country’s move toward a “rentership society,” Morgan Stanley said in a…
The math behind economies of scale
(TED) Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities — that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can…
It’s every person in the world, connected to every other person in the world, and no one fully understands how to make best use of this new reality because no one has seen anything like it before.
Designer and entrepreneur Ben Pieratt on the Internet.
The debt debate goes back long before Nov. 2010
(Reuters) – White House and congressional negotiators are racing against the clock to forge a deficit reduction deal that would clear the way for Congress to raise the $14.3 trillion…
The debt ceiling as a perpetual soufflé
As Veronique de Rugy explains, the debt ceiling was initiated in the U.S. in 1917 as a way to ensure responsibility in congress. Since then, government has raised it nearly…
This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this.
President Barack Obama on the negotiations for short term extension of the debt ceiling. (Dow Jones)- President Barack Obama threatened to veto any short- term extension of the debt ceiling,…