Last week in a post I looked at the geographic distribution of #venturecapital over the longest period I could find–Jan. 1, 2006 through Dec. 31, 2020, using NVCA data. Today, using the same 15-year period, […]

Last week in a post I looked at the geographic distribution of #venturecapital over the longest period I could find–Jan. 1, 2006 through Dec. 31, 2020, using NVCA data. Today, using the same 15-year period, […]
Has California lost Silicon Valley to Texas or Florida? Ha. Here’s what 15 years of data show…
Here’s why Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and GOP Senators are reluctant to help defray crippling, widespread economic costs of American higher ed. It’s real simple: There’s nothing in it for ‘em. See, Manchin and GOP […]
“A religion is not simply a collection of fragmentary beliefs about very specific objects...
“To a greater or lesser extent, all known religions have been systems of ideas that embrace the universality of things and give us a total representation of the world.”
—Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912
If you’re a sentient being and don’t live in a cave, you’ve heard that lowering the tax rate is how you jump-start the economy. Well, if your goal is raising incomes by lowering taxes, I call bullshit.
Hillary Clinton lost the suicide vote
The farther people live from each other the less they want to live. What evidence from the states shows…
Are workers’s lives better protected in “pro-life” states?
The answer, culled from facts not feelings, is unambiguous:
Source (and suggested reading): Francis Lee and Bruce Oppenheimer’s illuminating but now dated study, Sizing Up the Senate.
—and why whoever wins should temper expectations of dominating the Senate like it’s 1933 or 1965.
229 years of Senate history should temper expectations that the 2020 election will dramatically change control of the upper chamber.
The average state which elected Donald Trump had 93 people per square mile. Average state won by Hillary Clinton had 283 people per square mile. Density—the distance between us—matters. And so does information, which corresponds […]
For context , read this.
The Father of the Constitution—James Madison—feared that Senators representing a majority of states BUT a minority of Americans could end up picking our judges.
Fast forward 233 years…
Where’s your greatest chance of getting killed on the job?
The reddest of the Red states. That’s where.
As the US debates making compulsory wearing a mask to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic, it’s instructive to think what the Father of our country—George Washington thought about individual freedom vs the general good.
On July 9, 1787 in Philadelphia, the 50-something delegates to the Constitutional Convention argued intensely over how much a slave was worth while at the same time completely omitting the word “slavery” from the Constitution […]
What if the Founding Fathers didn’t actually like the Constitution they ended up with?
Hospitals and public health officials are reporting that African Americans are dying at higher rates–6X in Chicago vis a vis whites there. Here’s the reason why:
Between 1900 and 2014, the US spent 8X more of its national income on public health. During the same time, its citizens could expect to live 31 years longer.
Researchers at the National Institute of Health examined six years of workplace safety data from the 1990s. Here’s what they found:
The right doesn’t love to hate the left’s biggest cities and states.
It has to…
Here’s the saddest song I’ve got:
Here’s a short story:
Here’s my short story for Saturday:
During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Ben Franklin was concerned that giving states equal power regardless of their populations would allow a minority to rule a majority. Fast forward to 2020: The GOP Senate majority […]
I’ve never met someone in HR who keeps track of the marginal product of labor. In the real world (like outside of an econ textbook) employee pay has little to do with actual productivity and […]
The US Senate *majority* represents a *minority* of the population and a minority of the economy. The very structure of our government is flawed—and it’s exactly what the protagonists of the US Constitution feared. Consider […]
Short version (to be elaborated on in future post): UBI (and M4A and affordable housing) raises reservation wage –> shifts labor supply curve —> new (higher) equilibrium wage.
I like to think this blog is about my own ideas, but sometimes something comes along that’s worth repeating. This is one of those. “The late Ryszard Kapuściński coined a striking term to describe those […]
“Every particle in nature has an amplitude to move backwards in time…”
Capitalism defeated Communism? More like de facto socialism defeated Russian imperialism. Here’s why.
Billionaires aren’t winners of an actual free market. Their companies (eg Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Berkshire Hathaway, et al) are price-setting, not price-taking, monopolies, monopsonies and oligopolies. Investors don’t want to invest in companies with competition. […]
The relationship between gun ownership rate and the homicide rate is clear. They’re closely connected. So just how closely correlated are they? Well, in fact, the rate of gun ownership explains 76% of the variation […]
Read the chart. It should speak for itself. I bring data to the convo. No point arguing about subject without seeing the numbers. Here they are. The correlation is significant. R-squared value shown. […]
What do Nixon, Ford, Bush 1, Bush 2, John McCain and Mitt Romney have in common? Two things: First, they were the choices of Republican voters gave us. They were their boys. Two–here it comes–Republicans […]
They’re probably rolling in their graves. They’re invoked constantly–but rarely with any specificity. I’m talking about the US Founding Fathers and the narratives we’ve spun about their political, social and economic thoughts. That is, […]
What if Adam Smith’s legacy had been completely hijacked by a visible hand of naked self-interest?
What if the biggest complainers about the federal government were its biggest beneficiaries?
Well…
Median pay of the 10 fastest growing jobs between 2016 and 2026 is $27,000
It’s about leverage. You produce more money per hour than you get paid for—otherwise you wouldn’t be hired by a for-profit company. But the amount you get isn’t set in stone. Your worth depends on […]
Unlike ownership of cars or knives or hammers or nails or lead paint or parachutes, the primary purpose of gun ownership is staying safe and yet the primary effect of more gun ownership is less safety.
Three decades of data show clearly: gun deaths fall when gun ownership falls and rise when gun ownership rises.
What free market? As the US debates “socialism” and “capitalism”, it’s important to remember that government has been a large part of the American economy for generations. Consider data from the last 70 years […]
We might be living in an age of self-driving cars and going to Mars, but we also have totem poles.