joshuago’s economics Bookmarks

They looked at my prices, and they knew: if this guy doesn’t raise his prices, he’s not going to be around long. They saw this problem clearly, and they saw it long before I did. So they told me.

In the public sector, the "consumer" often has little choice... so-called "market discipline" is a lot more diffuse when you have a former-schoolteacher-or-real-estate-broker-turned city councilman whose job it is to disburse a multi-million-dollar street-paving contract. And neither the schoolteacher nor the real-estate broker has any clue how to write or evaluate a road-paving contract.

Progress is inexorable, cumulative, and collective if human beings exchange and specialize. Globalization and the Internet are bound to ensure furious economic progress in the coming century.

An interesting case study and example of businesses that shrink markets through newfound efficiencies. First Round Capital wants to invest in companies that take five dollars of revenue from a competitor for every dollar earned.

Scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture - it's getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny.

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

The very efficiency of the VAT means that it throws off huge amounts of revenue that politicians eagerly spend. The VAT thus becomes an engine of even greater public spending.

When the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Interview with a Nobel economist who says the health-care bill will cause serious damage, but that the American people can be trusted to vote for limited government in November. Discusses the counterbalancing effect of competing interest groups, in-built suspicion of markets, and the historical intellectual shift on the view of growth from one that was state-centered to one that's market-centered.

CPU of choice for mobile devices. Low licensing fee. Fungibility of processors between manufacturers. Closing performance gap with x86.