joshuago’s economics Bookmarks

Progress in science and technology is stalling. The technology slowdown threatens not just our financial markets, but the entire modern political order, which is predicated on easy and relentless growth.

Long-term, jobs can only come through education, training and investment in regions of the country that are not IT centers. No quick fix.

Karl Rove reviews five books: The Federalist Papers, Democracy in America (Alexis de Tocqueville), The Conscience of a Conservative (Barry Goldwater), Capitalism and Freedom (Milton Friedman), and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Adam Smith).

Content creation is for suckers. The real money and power have always been in aggregation. The recent struggles of the previously unassailable giants can be attributed to diminished effectiveness of old methods of aggregation.

No one knows what the word “stochastic” means.

A sad survey of the plight of Mexican migrant farm workers in the United States. A fair treatment of the issue and its various stakeholders.

Just as Max Kleiber described animal scaling laws with equations, Geoffrey West has discovered laws that govern how entire cities function.

Firms exist because going to the market all the time can impose heavy transaction costs. A firm is essentially a device for creating long-term contracts when short-term contracts are too bothersome.

A fun read detailing how Bram Cohen, Shawn Fanning, Justin Frankel, and Jon Johansen changed the world in their own unique ways. Inspiring to ambitious programmers everywhere.

The economic downturn in the United States has had an unexpected consequence for startups – it has created more of them. Young and old, innovators who are unemployed or underemployed now face less risk in starting a company. They have a lot less to lose and a lot more to gain.