Why I Love America: John McCain, Barack Obama, and the Internet

Election night reminded me once more what a crazy, wonderful country I live in.  Barack Obama gave an incredible, uplifting victory speech to match his great accomplishment.  John McCain’s concession speech was literally jaw-dropping.   His eloquence, graciousness, and humility were inspiring; a few more performances that good and he may not have had to concede!  [...]

College Taught Me How to Vote (sometimes)

As I filled out my absentee ballot, I found myself deeply ambivalent- both about the local races I know nothing about, and the Presidential race I’ve been reading about for months and could talk about for hours.  I wonder whether all these things I know about the candidates reflect what they know about themselves and [...]

Rock Bottom

It’s real hard to know exactly when we hit rock bottom, but after enough free-fall its a pretty safe bet that the big splat is near.  If you’re in to speculation, now seems like a great time to get into commodity and currency markets; say, buying some oil futures high and holding Icelandic kronas.
For some [...]

Nightclubs take the Clubbing they Deserve

My own thoughts echoed with hyperbole in The Guardian.
“Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they “enjoy” clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.”
Certainly if a critical mass of people decide something is [...]

The Use of Knowledge in Society

Freidrech Hayek’s 1945 essay in AER was decades ahead of its time, long pre-empting much of the economics profession on the importance of dispersed information.  It also showed why Communism was doomed to failure, though it took many poor and deadly decades before the experiment was admitted to have confirmed his theory.

Elitist Economists

When I tell people I’m studying economics, many respond with something like “thats great, I wish I knew more about handling money” or even more directly “now you can tell me what to do with my money!”.
Of course, as an economist I have no special knowledge about this.  A financial economist could give them narrow [...]

The Presidential High Dive

As cynical Americans, we hardly expect our politicians to do in office what they promised to do on the campaign trail.  But many presidents end up doing just the opposite of what they promised, speeding away from their original platform like an Olympian diving off the 10 meter- though rarely with such purpose or grace.
Woodrow [...]

R.I.P. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I have immense respect for a man who can go through ten years of hell and come out a kinder, more generous, more courageous, and more articulate person.
Here’s to a great man and great writer.
From The Gulag Archipelago:
“So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right [...]

Would Edmund Burke have opposed the war in Iraq?

Edmund Burke, the 19th century British statesman and writer, is something of a patron saint to conservative intellectuals- the same people who spent countless hours arguing about whether the war was a good idea, the same people who largely decided that it was. So I was quite surprised to realize that I’ve never heard [...]

Thought Catalyst

Brain output is quite variable, presumably because brain input is similarly variable.
So when is it that you think best?
For me, its in math classes.  My brain recognizes the diffuculty of the problems being presented, calls up the reserve power, then proceeds to apply it to any problem except the one being presented.  I should really [...]