Labor + Capital + Raw Materials = Finished Goods [Note to Readers: This year, approximately 500,000 high school seniors applied to the Ivy League and highly selective schools like Stanford (my alma mater), MIT, and the University of Chicago. Around 475,000 of them (95%) — including my hard-working, ridiculously talented 18 year-old son — were...Read More
Labor + Capital + Raw Materials = Finished Goods I spent four years learning economics at Stanford. I’ve spent (going on) the last forty years unlearning it. It’s not that Stanford failed me. It turns out that the entire field of modern economics was built upon not one but two outmoded ideas, if not conceptual...Read More
Labor + Capital + Raw Materials = Finished Goods I spent four years learning economics at Stanford. I’ve spent (going on) the last forty years unlearning it. It’s not that Stanford failed me. It turns out that the entire field of modern economics was built upon not one but two outmoded ideas, if not conceptual...Read More
The King Queen Has No Clothes (Other Than Black) “U.S. Probes Theranos Complaints” —Headline; The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 21, 2015) If you’re not familiar with blood testing start-up Theranos, here’s the Reader’s Digest version: wunderkind founder Elizabeth Holmes drops out of Stanford at 19 years old, comes up with a revolutionary (and vastly cheaper)...Read More
Economist: “Assume You Have a Can Opener”* Everything I learned about economics at Stanford turned out to be useless. In fact, worse than useless, because it was wrong, and therefore had to be flushed (unlearned). (Sorry, Mom; sorry, Dad. Thankfully, not everything I learned in college was for naught.) Economics’ Dark Age In Stanford’s defense,...Read More
Vertical Bike Stands in Downtown Palo Alto Once upon a time — like in the late ’70’s, when I was a Stanford undergrad — neighboring University Ave. definitely wasn’t seedy, but it was no one’s idea of upscale, either: after all, the low-rent University Creamery was practically an anchor tenant (still the best chocolate shake...Read More
