I enjoy Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales’ podcast, Capitalisn’t. I’ve listened to a few episodes and I find them to be very informative and thought-provoking. One I listened to recently was this one with Elizabeth Popp Berman, who argues that that measuring …
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Imagine a factory that dyes wool. The waste chemicals just get discharged into the river that runs by the factory. Fish get killed, but the factories costs are minimized and consumers benefit from cheaper coloured clothes. It’s hard to quantify, but clearly the benefit of …
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Adam Smith divided value into wages, profits and rent. Rent was the income derived from that factor of production whose supply was perfectly inelastic, the return to the rentier, which comprises an income derived from the scarcity of land, of which there is a fixed amount …
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The Tidal Wave substack writes beautifully about the challenges of shorting a bubble: On NVIDIA, Fading the Hype, and a Look Back at the Dot-Com Bubble.
As the post makes clear, it’s damn tough, because a …
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I have had a number of close friends and relations suffer from Crohn’s Disease and similar autoimmune conditions (including the most common of all, coeliac disease). My best friend from school had Crohn’s, as did his brother. It’s a pretty terrible …
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Tony Blair has been in the news again. It’s the 20th anniversary of the Second Gulf War. There are numbers of reports of Keir Starmer soliciting advice from Tony Blair (e.g. here). The shadow cabinet have been working hard to raise …
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Inflation is an obsession with most economists, which is weird, because most of economics deliberately tries to ignore it and focus on real variables. For most ordinary mortals, money is what they spend their valuable time trying to earn. For economists, money …
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I am no fan of Elon Musk. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a narcissistic psychopath. But even narcissistic psychopaths have been known to do some good sometimes. He has released some internal Twitter documents to a …
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This article explains how tough it is to be an academic at Oxford. The subject of the article, Henry, has been seriously let down by the university, and is deserving of sympathy. I feel sorry for the guy, but my sympathy is …
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