The Three Types of People Who Wind Up Rich and How They Destroy the Wealth of...
Models of economics which don’t handle power are marginal at best. They serve only to describe what happens in situations where no one has enough power to set the rules or where there is a central...
View ArticleFourteen Points on the World Economy as the US GDP Drops .7 Percent
So, while it generally takes two quarters for a recession to be so-called, it may be that the recession is here. Let us recap the non-recessionary period: The percentage of people employed in the US...
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No One Who Hasn’t Sold Their Soul Can Afford a Home in London
And that’s why London is losing its soul and becoming an uninteresting place to live: London housing price to earnings ratio From 2.6 to 9.1. This is a government choice. It is related to allowing the...
View ArticleIn France, There Is a Cost to Executives for Laying People Off
This is mild compared to what happened to managers in the early twentieth century, mind you: Union activists protesting nearly 3,000 proposed layoffs at Air France stormed the headquarters during a...
View ArticleTunnels of the Underclass
My parents were rich, then poor, then middle class during my life. My father both made and lost a fortune in his thirties and forties. I went, paid for partially by the UN, to an elite private school....
View ArticleWhy Inequality Is Intrinsically Bad
For most of human existence, humans lived in hopelessly egalitarian societies. Hunter-gatherer bands, and even early agricultural communities, were very egalitarian. If you want to go evolutionary,...
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Book Review: The Spirit Level
Given all the controversy around inequality, this is a must read book. About three-quarters of it is what I call “proving the obvious”–that inequality is, in fact, bad in every way imaginable....
View ArticleThe “Missing” Inflation Shows Up as Hyper-inflation
In things that rich people buy. Ever since the financial crisis, there has been a lot of screaming about inflation. Screaming that it should show up, with all the money being created by central banks...
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Meritocracy? What Meritocracy?
From Saez, Chetty, et al So, unless you think that genetic potential is that unequally distributed (and can explain eras where this chart did not apply, as in the post-WWII decades), you can pretty...
View ArticleMaking the Rich and Powerful Work for Everyone
The philosopher John Rawls suggested that the only ethical society is one which we design before we know what position we will hold in it. If you don’t know whether you’ll be born the child of janitor...
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