The Fantastic Masculinity of Newt Scamander from: December 13, 2017 at 04:20PM
Switzerland is Prepared for Civilizational Collapse from: December 12, 2017 at 09:35AM
How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult from: December 10, 2017 at 04:31PM
The importance of appreciating complexity from: December 6, 2017 at 06:25PM
Pass-through of minimum wages into U.S. retail prices from: December 5, 2017 at 11:29AM
The new Chetty, et.al. paper on innovation and inventors from: December 4, 2017 at 08:50AM
The early moderns had their work cut out curating their honour from: November 27, 2017 at 07:56PM
Human Brains Have Evolved Unique ‘Feel-Good’ Circuits “Sapolsky cites evidence that in humans, dopamine levels rise dramatically when we anticipate rewards that are uncertain and far in the future, like retirement or even the afterlife. That could explain what motivates people to work for things that have no obvious short-term benefit, he says.”
Book Review: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours from: November 14, 2017 at 11:02AM
“Democracy in Dark Times” and the revolt of the public “We could see fierce old dictatorships losing control over their own stories. A surprising number of them collapsed. Democratic governments became terrified of the public, and with good reason. The wave of information resembled an acid bath of negation. Information, it turned out, has authority […]
Postmodernism For Rationalists (my attempt) from: November 2, 2017 at 11:02AM
Math’s Beautiful Monsters “By the 1970s, Itō’s work had blossomed into a whole new area of mathematics, called stochastic calculus (mathematicians like calling things that are random “stochastic”). It came with a whole new set of tools and theorems, just as calculus had. Today, stochastic calculus is used to study all sorts of phenomena, from […]
How Did New Atheism Fail So Miserably? from: October 24, 2017 at 10:49PM
Is this the world you should want? from: October 24, 2017 at 12:24PM
Yoram Hazony on classical liberalism from: October 24, 2017 at 09:47AM
The Loss of Loss Aversion: Will It Loom Larger Than Its Gain? “Loss aversion, the principle that losses loom larger than gains, is among the most widely accepted ideas in the social sciences. The first part of this article introduces and discusses the construct of loss aversion. The second part of this article reviews evidence […]
The Laffer curve for high incomes (pdf) “Revenue-maximizing rates accordingly range between 60 and 76 percent. In five cases, the country is estimated to be on the wrong side of the Laffer curve, implying a degree of self-financing exceeding 100 percent. The average effective marginal tax rate is 57 percent, while the average estimated revenue-maximizing […]
Where Do We Come From? from: October 18, 2017 at 04:25PM
For Me To Win, You Have to Lose “Trump’s idea of business is basically cheating. That doesn’t necessarily mean breaking the law, though Trump does plenty of that. It means making money by trickery and hard dealing in which the other party usually ends up screwed. Those just aren’t the skills that end up being […]
A Systems Approach to Social Disintegration “Conventional thinking can work for straightforward problems such as healing a wound, but it is not suitable for social problems with all their interlocking features. For example, ending homelessness cannot be accomplished just by providing shelter. It requires a set of long-term initiatives encompassing changes to housing policy, expansion […]