Archive

For the last eighteen months, I’ve read several books to help remove the scales from my eyes. The journey started when the professors of my economics fellowship program challenged common stories I believed but had not really questioned or thought through thoroughly. It opened my eyes to the fact

The holiday season is a canary in the economic coal mine. Black Friday kicks off the largest shopping season of the year, pushing the negative, red retailer financials into the positive, black territory. That phenomenon matters particularly this year, not only for retailers, but for all of us. Because consumer

For decades, people have predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will totally change the way we do everything. That time has come, and I want to show you a picture of it. Many people thought that AI was years, maybe decades, away from learning human language well enough to create publishable

It’s a foregone conclusion that Christianity is declining in America. Could that impact the nation’s economy? In short, some economists believe that the answer is yes. Most people think of economics in terms of money, but it’s much more than that. In this column, we’ve learned

Language has always been one of the hardest things for computers to understand. But lately, there have been some incredible advances in artificial intelligence (AI) that are making it possible for machines to not only understand our written language, but also to generate their own coherent writing. In this blog

This week, the founder of Patagonia gave away his company to two trusts, one for voting shares and one for non-voting shares. The information garnered wide acclaim. I had two initial reactions. First, I respect the move immensely. Most companies say they believe in this or that, but they rarely

When we think about what will happen in the future, we often think about static systems rather than dynamic systems. That is, we think about what will happen in the future given the reality we experience today, not the actual state of things in the future. Imagine, for instance, living

Reality is complex. It doesn’t fit neatly into normal distributions or simplistic versions of the tiny images in our head of how the world should be. Should, by the way, is one of the more frightening words in the English language. This I discovered recently while talking among friends.

When you’ve arrived at the grocery store in the last few months, did the prices surprise you? Did you decide to buy the usual or not to buy that steak or your favorite cereal? Many people are feeling the pinch at the counter and, as The New York Times

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, as the saying goes. That’s because our world was created with limited resources. Unlimited demand from our troubled hearts is everywhere and at all times met with limited supply. “Everything we get,” writes Henry Hazlitt in his classic book Economics