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In 1513, an Italian politician named Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a treatise to help the newly appointed ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de Medici, the grandson of Lorenzo the Great, gain and maintain power. The elder statesman Machiavelli sought to teach the young duke everything he knew about how to be a

Imagine your pastor steps up to the pulpit this Sunday and delivers an eloquent, easy-to-follow message on a particular passage of scripture. He or she provides context on where you are in the Bible, making clear the timeline of the book, its provenance, and its contents. You also hear dramatic

This week we’ve discussed readings on topics like statistics and markets. Reading all these works, however, led me to realize that I wasn’t thinking well in general. Now, if you don’t know the name Charlie Munger, I highly recommend you check him out. Charlie Munger is an

Capital markets represent the epitome of statistics plus irrationality. As John Maynard Keynes said, “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Clear thinking about markets has become increasingly important to me, given the latest implosions and scandals that have rocked Wall Street of late. I’ll

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