My Big Toe

A large problem in physics concerns the nature of quantum reality, where as Richard Feynman famously  said, “if you think you understand it,...

Missing Risk Premium: a Synopsis

I recently made a presentation of my book, The Missing Risk Premium , and thought it was concise, so I'm sharing it here. Historical ret...

Are Pre-Modern Societies Socialist?

Many assume that pre-modern society was communistic, like hunter gatherers, and these roots give us a socialist intuition. Larry Arnhart ar...

Milton Friedman on Behavioral Economics Circa 1978

Ever since Freakonomics and Kahneman's Nobel prize, people have been writing articles about the radical new idea that people are not lig...

Beware Discrete Auctions

There's an interesting paper on High Frequency Trading (HFT) by Budish, Cramton, and Shim from the U of Chicago. They set up an intere...

Trayvon Martin and Keynesian Multipliers

Pundits, websites, and news programs had very predictable opinions on the guilt of Zimmerman based on their view about Keynesian multipliers...

Altenatives to Rational Expectations

When Rational Expectations was developed in the 1960s most people thought it was a classic academic result.  Certainly mutual fund managers ...

Stevenson and Wolfers' Flawed Happiness Research

Russ Roberts had a podcast a couple weeks ago where he interviewed Betsy Stevenson (below) and Justin Wolfers (right), primarily about their...

Gettysburg and American Exceptionalism

150 years ago, Gettysburg was fought.  Here is War Nerd on the battle: You know how many civilians were killed in the whole battle of Gettys...