How do entrepreneurs assess political risk? Other than Mark Zuckerberg, do they even think about it? Are technology companies and social networks on the side of the populists? Division is in the air. Everything I read and everything I hear is about the great global divide. The populists are rising up against the elites. The“Crossing the Political-Economic Divide”
Category: Blog
The Labor Constraint
A few years ago I managed an NGO that served 20,000 subsistence farmers in Mali. I was surprised when I first arrived to find many of our farmers planting less than half their land. They might have 10 hectares but were planting only 2 or 3. The reason? Not enough labor to get it done“The Labor Constraint”
Surveillance Economics or Why Does My Barber Have an App?
Does my barber need an app? Contemplating that question opened up an intriguing can of worms… One of the more difficult aspects of economic analysis is the unfortunate fact that economies involve humans making decisions. The math works, but the results don’t follow the math because the humans don’t pay attention to the equations. Interest“Surveillance Economics or Why Does My Barber Have an App?”
Are You an Accountable Capitalist?
You may get this question in some future due diligence session from an investor, an investment banker working on your IPO or a potential acquirer. If the Accountable Capitalism Act proposed by Senator Warren becomes law, it will become a basic compliance checkpoint for all of us. As proposed, the law only affects companies with“Are You an Accountable Capitalist?”
Next Steps for this Fed?
Watching Fed Chairman Jerome Powell testify to our esteemed but largely innumerate members of Congress, I was reminded that once government begins a massive intervention in a market two things happen. First, the bureaucrats are reluctant to give up their new found power and will endeavor to keep the intervention going long past its usefulness.“Next Steps for this Fed?”
The World according to Z
At the recent F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg jokes that; “We don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy.” No one laughed. Clearly, his developer audience took user demands for privacy protection more seriously than Mr. Z. Other than the desperate need of a new speechwriter, what is going wrong with Facebook? In March, Zuckerberg published,“The World according to Z”
The Internet and the Long Tails of Political Discourse
Below is a graph of a standard normal frequency distribution. It was created with a random number generator but these types of distributions are also very common in nature. For example, if you count the kernels on the cobs from the 30,000 corn plants in an acre, that data will track a normal distribution. The“The Internet and the Long Tails of Political Discourse”
How Green a Deal?
When I was a leftist radical some decades ago in Berkeley, I joined in many late-night to early- morning discussions about the woes of the world. The Vietnam War was raging, we were all subject to the draft and none of us were old enough to vote. Air pollution and water pollution were a plague“How Green a Deal?”
I see…. Oh!
You go away for a few years to work in Africa and when you get back the U.S. capital markets seem to have gone right through the looking glass. For those that never left, the issuance of bizarre security types is just another small evolutionary step like the frog sitting in a pot of water“I see…. Oh!”
Between the Bubble and the Bitcoin Bitters
I recently read this item in the Wall Street Journal, “Nvidia misjudged how quickly prices for the graphics cards that those chips go into would normalize now that crypto currency mining isn’t as hot.” That seemed odd. In July 2007, I read about an obscure German bank in Düsseldorf, IKB Deutsche Industriebank. The bank was“Between the Bubble and the Bitcoin Bitters”