02 January 2021

Thomas Jefferson's Tragic Conflict He Left the Country to Violently Reconcile

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Thomas Jefferson was still in his thirties when his wife Martha died. As she lay on her deathbed, grieved at the thought of some other woman...
01 January 2021

Trump by the Numbers: Stock Market, Deficits and Job Creation

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Some numbers on the Trump presidency. With twenty days left in office, the market has done better under only one other president since Geral...
31 December 2020

Are Sports Win-Win or Win-Lose? It Depends. (or, how what we believe changes facts or how Phil Knight and Michael Jordan changed the NBA)

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What we believe changes facts. If we believe that the world is zero-sum (and many people still do), it will be. What I get comes at the expe...
30 December 2020

Why 21st Century Republican Presidencies Have Ended in Disaster (or, the disastrous ideology that now governs Republicans when they govern)

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It is no coincidence that after the last two Republican presidencies, our county has been left in ruin. Incompetent government programs and ...
29 December 2020

The Past and Future Rise in the Percentage of People Who Have (and will) Become Financially Independent

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Before the Civil War, only 1% of households had a flush toilet. By 1989, 100% of households did. In 1924, 0% of Americans had a refrigerator...
27 December 2020

How the Best Selling Non-fiction Book of the 1970s (about the Apocalypse, no less) Defined Policy in the 1980s and 2000s

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The nuclear arms race offered the prospect of the annihilation of civilization. This created some stress that showed up in odd ways. In 1970...
26 December 2020

The Shocking, Opening Lines of Obama's New Memoir

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I got Obama's new memoir for Christmas and was really surprised at the opening lines. "Having been born and raised in Kenya, I was ...
25 December 2020

A Brief Meditation on Christmas

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I write about politics and policy a lot because I have to live with your vote and you with mine but write about religion hardly at all becau...
24 December 2020

2020 - SPACs and A Year Defined by an Abundance of Capital and a Shortage of Entrepreneurs and IPOs

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2020 was a great year for IPOs. That makes sense. Interest rates are incredibly low (which drives up the value of future profits), savings a...
21 December 2020

Bitcoin is Not an Investment or a Currency (and if you're in the mood for wild speculation, there is a much better way to do that)

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Bitcoin has roughly doubled in the last couple of months. The dollar bill is rather oddly adorned with a pyramid. Bitcoin, by contrast, is a...
16 December 2020

Politics, Polygamy and the GOP - a tentative theory about why there is a divide between men and women's voting tendencies

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Spinster comes from a term used for a woman who spun wool. By some counts this was an occupation for a woman who couldn't get married. B...
12 December 2020

How the Republican Party Won the Dixiecrats and Lost Their Soul

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In 1968, Republican Richard Nixon beat Democrat Hubert Humphrey by half a million votes. They each got more than 31 million votes. George Wa...
09 December 2020

What The Coming Facebook Breakup Could Mean for Your Friend Group

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This is quite the headline: "U.S., states sue Facebook as an illegal monopoly, setting stage for potential breakup" I wonder how t...
08 December 2020

Investing in Rather than Loaning to Startups - What Tesla Can Tell us About the Popularization of Entrepreneurship

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People don't need lower taxes once they're successful in order to have proper incentive to create wealth. But they can use help to g...
04 December 2020

The Good and the Bad News: We Have an Abundance of Labor and Capital (or, how you can hardly spend enough on the coming recovery)

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The American economy created 245,000 jobs in November. That's woefully insufficient. The economy has destroyed 9.4 million jobs this yea...
30 November 2020

Why Harvard Might Not Be So Great (Or, one reason median wage gains have slowed since 2000)

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Imagine that someone had come up with a vaccine or health supplement or drug that they claimed had incredible health benefits. They shared d...
28 November 2020

The Future Has Never Been More Affordable: Why a Record Low Discount Rate Means We Should Be Investing at Unprecedented Levels

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The discount rate answers the question, "How much should we discount future cash flows or profits?" In 1981, the discount rate was...
22 November 2020

Protesting COVID and Other Realities

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I saw a headline this morning, "Crowd gathers in Huntington Beach in protest of COVID" and wondered how many crowds gathered in 19...
21 November 2020

How the Republican Teddy Roosevelt Helped to Define the 20th Century Democratic Party

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In 1860, the US elected its first Republican president. Abraham Lincoln and the presidents through the end of that century helped to make th...
19 November 2020

How Culture and Not Policy Might Explain the Vast Difference Between the US and East Asian Nations COVID Outcomes

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East Asia has done really well with COVID. We’ve done horribly. This might stem from who our culture has trained us to be. An Asian friend h...