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 […]
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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 Retail Trader “Rebellion” of January ’21 was, in itself, a short-lived affair. The concern that it would send the markets into a chaotic downward spiral that would extend through February proved false. The only residue left of the meteoric rise of stocks like Gamestop (GME) and AMC is their mildly elevated trading levels from […]
19 min read
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 […]
51 min read
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 […]
4 min read
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 […]
5 min read
