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
The King Has No Clothes Currency “Bitcoin mania reached new highs as the price of the digital currency jumped about 40% in about 40 hours, surging past the $16,000 mark.” —The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 8, 2017). Why is gold valuable? Mostly, because you can buy things with it, and only (very) secondarily, because you...Read More
“Recently, Overstock.com — an online retailer — agreed to accept bitcoins; the Sacramento Kings basketball team will do likewise. According to coinmap.org, about 2,600 stores and businesses worldwide accept bitcoins, with concentrations in Western Europe, California and New York.” –“Bitcoin: Is it a Boom, Or a Bubble?”; Robert Samuelson (Jan. 20, 2014) Sooner or later,...Read More
