Overview “Shadow work” is a concept from Jungian psychology that refers to the process of exploring and integrating the unconscious aspects of ourselves, often referred to as the “shadow.” The shadow consists of the parts of ourselves that we deny, suppress, or disown, often because they don’t align with our conscious self-image or societal expectations. […]
9 min read
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Merit has become a dirty word. Almost as bad as privilege. It has come to mean an unfair advantage that threatens to overturn diversity, equity, and inclusion. To reward someone for merit means not rewarding someone for failing to exhibit merit. Merit, by its very nature, is not easily won, regardless of what the rules […]
9 min read
Work on this article began when Bitcoin was trading at $60,000. Today (6/18/22) it has fallen below $20,000. Ethereum has, proportionately, taken an even bigger hit. And except for some well-backed stable coins, most cryptocurrencies are at the moment cratering. With inflation high and a recession looming, cryptocurrencies are now being dismissed as an example […]
80 min read
“Or How to Create NFTs on eBay That Confer Real Ownership” This talk was presented at the COSM.technology conference, November 10, 2021, in Bellevue, Washington. The simultaneous slideshow presentation is available here. [DISPLAY SLIDE 1] 1 The Buzz About NFTs This summer I wrote an article titled “How Non-Fungible Tokens Work: NFTs Explained, Debunked, and […]
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1 Market Caps Run Amuck In January 1999, I was at a Liberty Fund conference in Tucson having breakfast with a savvy old finance guy as he was reading the Wall Street Journal over coffee. He couldn’t believe the market capitalizations of various newly formed Internet companies. He kept comparing the market caps of these […]
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1 Rat Poison to an Infinite Power? Poised to radically reconfigure the crypto-asset market, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are revolutionizing our conception of money and value, creating not just entirely new markets but even new economies that are able to scale globally and to discover value in undreamt places, relegating to oblivion fiat currencies and […]
59 min read
Review of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism In setting the stage for this review of Shoshana Zuboff’s remarkable book, a brief selective history of the field of artificial intelligence will be helpful, especially in recalling the pioneering work of Norbert Wiener. “Artificial intelligence” (AI) is in common usage today, but the term is […]
11 min read
If you want to become super-rich, what are the best schools to attend? The simplest way to answer this question is to look at the richest people in the US and see where they went to school. In other words, look at the schools that got the most foot traffic from those who ended up […]
8 min read
The size of the US bond market is huge, sitting at around $40 trillion as of this writing in early 2021. Five years ago, it was about twice the size of the stock market. But with stocks booming and interest rates at all-time lows, the size of the stock market now comes to about $30 […]
8 min read
1 What is Money? How to use money that already exists? That’s easy. How to create money in the first place? That’s more complicated. This article will explain how money comes into existence. It will also explain how the different ways money comes into existence affects its use and abuse. First, a brief definition of […]
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Actual or not, fraud is widely perceived to have affected the 2020 Presidential election in the United States Bank fraud and election fraud have relevant similarities Banking cybersecurity techniques are applicable to election security Expensivity’s proposal for a Cryptosecure Election Protocol (CEP) would secure the electoral process With 2020 delivering perhaps the most contentious presidential […]
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The well-known Harvard economist Greg Mankiw recently blogged about a new website called AcademicInfluence.com. This site features some fascinating machine-learning tools for determining the most influential schools by discipline as well as the most influential faculty in those disciplines. You can even toggle the time-frame in which to gauge influence. If you do this for […]
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The two dirtiest words in economics are four-letter words beginning with “f”: free and fair. More economic mischief has been wrought through these two words than any others. These words have seemingly straightforward uses. Free can simply mean that no money or anything of value was given in exchange for a benefit. Such a benefit […]
24 min read
Sometimes it’s okay to let people who oppose your point of view also name your point of view. It happened happily to the early Christians. According to the New Testament book of Acts, followers of Christ were first called “Christians” at Antioch. The “‑ian” ending in “Christian” is a diminutive. Thus the word “Christians” originally […]
9 min read
Imagine a world in which money abounds but people are too fearful to spend it. Thinking that things can only get worse, they hold onto it for a worse emergency than the present distress. In consequence, even though there’s a lot of liquidity, very little gets spent. This is a deflationary scenario, and it doesn’t […]
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