Can a Computer do Your Job?

Physicist Steven Hsu has several interesting observations on the selection process of colleges and elite firms. One little aside on colleg...

The Office Test

Tyler Cowen supports his hypothesis that things haven't changed as much recently as they did in prior generations by looking at his kitc...

Cowen's Great Stagnation, von Mises's Great Solution

Tyler Cowen recently wrote a $4 e-book, The Great Stagnation , a book enjoyed by Reihan Salam on the right and Matthew Yglesias on the lef...

What Top Level Sociology Looks Like

I read the devastating review of Erik Olin's latest book, Envisaging Real Utopias. That motivated me to watch his video on his lates...

Adverse Timing Kills Returns

The average return of an asset is merely looks at the price. One can argue whether geometric or arithmetic averages are best, but let's...

Socrates's Lament

Nicholas Carr wrote The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains , which talks about how the internet is turning our minds into mu...

Tiger Mom Priorities

David Brooks wrote an op-ed criticizing Amy Chua's hypercritical, education-status oriented child-rearing strategy (see her WSJ piece h...

Tolerance can be Insulting

Over at Bloggingheads.tv, psychologist Joshua Knobe brings up the point that if someone is tolerant of your differences on something importa...

Examples of the Consensus

Robin Hanson reminds us that the scientific consensus is often wrong. Ron Bailey did a Nexis search of the phrase 'scientific consens...

A Different 'No Free Lunch' Theorem

Milton Friedman popularized the phrase 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' by using it as the title of a 1975 book, and it o...

Asset Pricing Theory Video

I did this using Xtranormal avatars, which perhaps will be the new PowerPoint. It's a substitute for Cochrane's Asset Pricing text...

Why Do People Gamble?

I was in Vegas last weekend, doing field research ;) on utility functions. People clearly like to gamble, and are willing to pay a premium ...

Kanye Likes Himself

It's actually an ugly watch: The rap giant's latest self-appreciative purchase is an $180,000 watch emblazoned with his own portrait...

Beta1.0 2010 Results

I have a website betaarbitrage.com , which I update monthly, and has the daily and monthly historical returns for minimum variance portfolio...

Forecasting Charlatans

An article in the Boston Globe by Joe Keohane discussing economic forecasting: Economists who had a better record at calling extreme events ...

Grameen Bank Hits Wall

For decades The Grameen Bank in Bangledesh was held out as sort of an anarcho-capitalist dream: small groups lending and monitoring borrowe...

Penny Stock Risk Premium Has Wrong Sign

In my book Finding Alpha I document 20 different asset classes where the risk premium is either missing or goes the wrong way. But I did ...

A Theory of Growth

Business cycles and the essence of long-run economic growth are distinct issues. Preventing recessions is not the key to growth, as these a...

The Next Train Wreck

From Joshua Rua's Are State Public Pensions Sustainable? Based on September 2009 asset values, if state pension fund asset returns have...

The Education 'Risk' Premium

A big puzzle in education is that there appears to be a huge wage premium to college--about 80%--and yet only 40% of high school graduates g...

Federal Regulators At Work

From Slashdot : As a result of the US Government's complete failure to investigate credible warnings about 'Underwear Bomber' Um...

NYT Pixel Chart

The Sunday NYT has a neat pixel chart , where the blocks are years from 1920 to 2010. Each cross-tab represents the return from the vertica...

Ezra Klein's Rise, Kaus's Stagnation

Ezra Klein recently create a lot of snickering when he stated that no one understands the US Constitution because it is over 100 years old ....