Author Archives: DW

Georgia Tech throws the first stone: The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors. Georgia Tech … Continue reading →

…it seems that strong families tend to be good for people individually, but bad for the world as a whole. Family clans tend to bring personal benefits, but social harms, such as less sorting, specialization, agglomeration, innovation, trust, fairness, and … Continue reading →

Here is a report by a UK equities research firm: Changes are afoot inside the world‟s major central banks… After more than a decade of inflation targeting, monetary authorities are, it seems, increasingly minded to go for growth, as the problem is … Continue reading →

Humans are good at throwing things. In fact, we’re great at it; no other animal can throw stuff like we can. Hm. How important is throwing? I wonder if Aliens, should they exist, throw? More here. -=-=- edit: the Randall … Continue reading →

But simple, beautiful mathematical explanations can make us greedy. While we wish for all explanations of the world around us to be elegant, science often involves “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact,” …“there is growing empirical … Continue reading →

Wolfers and Stevenson with a checklist for evaluating statistics. Here is the most important one, to me: If the author can’t explain what they’re doing in terms you can understand, then you shouldn’t be convinced. It’s the biggest problem I … Continue reading →

Another perspective on the big market turn in the early 00s: consider what happened to the European insurance industry in 2002. European insurers are allowed to invest much more in equities than their U.S. counterparts can. (Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A:NYSE) is an … Continue reading →

That’s the result of this bombing that will affect your lives and mine. Wait for the regulations to come out that say a minimum of 5 police officers and k-9 unit for every mile of race distance, or something similar. … Continue reading →

If we all came to see our political opponents not as nonsensical fools but as basically reasonable speakers of another language, we would not elect the demagogues we do now, or watch the same clowns on cable news. From this … Continue reading →

The biggest problem with maintaining such ancient computer systems is that the original technicians who knew how to configure and maintain them have long since retired or passed away, so no one is left with the knowledge required to fix … Continue reading →