John Maynard Keynes thought you were bad with money. Not you specifically. Everyone. The whole public. He believed that ordinary people, left to their own devices, would make financial decisions so poor that entire economies would collapse. And the frustrating part is that he was mostly right. This is the story of one of the […]
Keynes the Elitist: Why He Didn’t Trust the Public to Manage Their Own Money Read More »
Everyone has walked past a gold mine at some point. The opportunity was there, sitting in plain sight, but we simply did not see it. Later, someone else noticed it and made millions. We slap our foreheads and wonder how we missed something so obvious. Israel Kirzner, an economist who spent decades studying what makes
Israel Kirzner on Why the Most Alert Entrepreneurs are Often “Social Outsiders” Read More »
You swipe left. You swipe right. You send clever messages into the void. You show up to coffee dates with people who looked better in their photos and told better stories in their bios. Six months later, you’re still doing the same dance. But here’s the twist: staying single might be the most rational decision
When we measure human intelligence, we use IQ tests. When we measure computing power, we count operations per second. But how do you measure the intelligence of something bigger and stranger, like a corporation, a city government, or an entire economy? Herbert Simon spent his life answering this question, though he never put it quite
The IQ of an Effective System According to Herbert Simon Read More »
Every April, millions of people experience the same ritual humiliation. They calculate how much money they earned through honest work, then watch roughly a third of it vanish into government coffers through income tax. Meanwhile, the person living off inherited wealth in the penthouse upstairs pays less tax than the janitor who cleans it. Something
The Story We Tell Ourselves About Regulation When you think about regulations, you probably imagine stuffy government bureaucrats protecting you from dangerous products or crooked businesses. That mental picture makes sense. After all, that is what we learn in school. Regulations exist to protect the little guy from the big bad corporation. They keep our
George Stigler’s Razor: If a Regulation Exists, Someone is Making Money Off It Read More »
You cut someone off in traffic because your child is vomiting in the back seat and you need to pull over immediately. The other driver thinks you’re a selfish idiot. Later that week, someone cuts you off and you think they’re a selfish idiot. You have no idea they’re rushing to the hospital. This isn’t
Dan Ariely on Why We Judge Others by Their Actions but Ourselves by Our Intentions Read More »
Your economy is booming. Your GDP climbs every quarter. Jobs multiply like rabbits. And yet, people are fighting in the streets over a piece of cloth or a chunk of bronze from 1887. Welcome to the 21st century, where prosperity doesn’t buy peace and economic growth can’t compete with identity. Samuel Huntington saw this coming
The War of the Symbols: Why Hijabs, Flags, and Statues Matter More Than GDP Read More »
Imagine trying to predict which businesses will survive the next decade using the same math that calculates planetary orbits. Sounds absurd, right? Yet for over a century, this has been economics’ deepest ambition. The field has been chasing the ghost of Isaac Newton, hoping to discover eternal laws that govern markets the way gravity governs
Richard Nelson: Why Economics Needs a Darwin, Not a Newton Read More »
When Winning Looks Like Losing The tank is stuck in the mud. The general surveys the battlefield and sees his forces retreating. By every traditional measure, he has lost. But three thousand miles away, a different story appears on screens around the world. In this version, the retreat becomes a strategic repositioning. The stuck tank