Another Thiel Theme: Short Globalization
In his conversation with Tyler Cowen, this theme was not as pervasive as contrarianism, but I found it more interesting and more provocative. Thiel’s view is that globalization has peaked. Therefore,...
View ArticleThe Case for Taxing College Endowments
Jorge Klor de Alva and Mark Schneider make the argument. many of the richest universities in the country–sitting on hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in tax exempt endowments, and...
View ArticleFour Forces Watch: Poor Children Have Smaller Brains
The Washington Post did not put this story on page one. >New research that shows poor children have smaller brains than affluent children has deepened the national debate about ways to narrow the...
View ArticleBrad DeLong on the Public Sector vs. the Private Sector
He writes, Now we know that as bad as market failures can be, government failures can be worse. We badly need new effective institutional forms. But the decreasing salience of “Smithian” commodities in...
View ArticleReal Interest Rates and Secular Trends
Commenter Handle writes, There’s nothing an entrepreneurial employer can buy to augment his workers to increase their labor productivity. They’re no equipment or anything for him to invest in. There’s...
View ArticlePredict the Impact on Inequality
The WSJ reports, Basically, the long-time “gap” between the fertility of educated versus less-educated mothers—more educated mothers have fewer kids—is closing. This could help explain what’s happening...
View ArticleVinod Khosla Talks His Book
He writes, Just in the Khosla Ventures portfolio alone, entrepreneurs already are trying to use machine learning technologies to replace human judgment in many areas including farm workers, warehouse...
View ArticleNormal is an Economist’s Illusion
Tyler Cowen writes, Once unsustainable economic structures begin to fail, it takes a significant improvement to make them viable again. Yet because of the difficulty of making major changes under our...
View ArticleHousing and the Punch Bowl
On Wednesday, I appeared on a panel discussing the state of credit underwriting in the housing market. I raised two questions: 1. Are national credit standards, set by Freddie, Fannie, and FHA,...
View ArticleThe New Matchmaking
A reader suggests, probably correctly, that this story belongs under Four Forces Watch. The company has come up with a secret algorithm that invites select users to access the app based primarily on...
View ArticleThe Trade Slowdown
Bernard Hoekman writes, Slow trade growth has led to worries that the world economy has run into a ‘peak trade’ constraint, i.e. the ratio of global trade to GDP has reached a limit (Economist 2014)....
View ArticleFour Forces Watch
Richard Reeves says, What’s been driving the kind of economic separation has been a combination of two main factors: One, well-established earnings inequality and higher returns to higher education at...
View ArticlePeter Zeihan’s world view
I am reading his book The Absent Superpower. You can get a lot of his ideas by watching this video. You can also see his intellectual style, which is certainly more confident than mine. He deals in...
View ArticleRay Dalio’s data points
The essay is on inequality, but there are interesting statistics scattered throughout. For example, While many of the major causes of death have been flat or falling over the last 15 years, deaths from...
View ArticleDisaggregating the economy/New Commanding Heights watch
A chart from Jeff Desjardins shows the largest employer in each state. The results: Wal-mart is the largest in 22 states. A health care network is the largest in 12 states. A university system is the...
View ArticleDisaggregating the economy: clusters ten years later
A dozen years after coming out with The Clustering of America, Michael Weiss published The Clustered World, in 2000. This incorporated census data from 1990, which moved the analysis 10 years forward,...
View ArticleCity income differentials widen
Thomas B. Edsall writes, According to Romem, between 2005 and 2016, those moving into the San Francisco area had median household incomes averaging $12,639 a year more than the households of the...
View ArticleAssortative Mating
Alparslan Tuncay writes, I look at assortative mating based on the permanent wage, which is constructed by removing age and year components from wage, and using couple rank correlation in the permanent...
View ArticleEconomics over sociology?
Consider Marriage Markets, by June Carbone and Naomi Cahn. They write, At the top, there are more successful men seeking to pair with a smaller pool of similarly successful women. In the middle and the...
View ArticleElites and the economy
Donald Schneider writes, The economy has undergone massive shifts over the last several decades. The opening of new markets exposed domestic workers to fierce competition and increased the returns to...
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