The doctrine known as “effective altruism” (EA) is very recent. It was introduced around 2009 at Princeton University by Matt Wage, a graduate student of the controversial moral philosopher Peter Singer. The ideas behind EA spread like wildfire, arriving in Oxford University in 2011, where Will MacAskill founded the Centre for Effective Altruism. What is […]
12 min read
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Book Review: Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence, by Vivek Ramaswamy. New York: Center Street/Hachette Book Group, 2022. 275 pp. $29.00. Nation of Victims is a strange book. By turns heartwarming anecdote, personal confession, history lesson, economics treatise, policy position paper, potted history of the highlights […]
18 min read
Who is RFK Jr.? Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (b. 1954) is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of Robert F. Kennedy Sr. His uncle was assassinated in 1963. His father was assassinated in 1968 while running for US president. RFK Jr. was 14 at the time.. RFK Jr studied law at […]
7 min read
I was raised in a politically conservative family in Texas, back in the 1950s. My first experience with electoral politics occurred at the age of 12, when my grandparents took me to hear a stump speech by Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater during his 1964 run for the Presidency against the Democratic incumbent, Lyndon B. […]
16 min read
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
We all reflect the times in which we live—even the most influential and powerful among us. It is just that most lives whisper in 8-point type, in keeping with a modest place in the scheme of things, while the makers of history shout in 72-point size. For this reason, the study of “parallel lives” from […]
6 min read
Hint: The Cause and Fix Are Not What You Think The classic line “I have a bad feeling about this” is repeated in every Star Wars movie. It’s become a meme for that uneasy feeling that as bad as things are now, they are about to get much worse. That’s an accurate portrayal of how […]
45 min read
This article is the first in a three-part series explaining why the economic inflation we are experiencing was all-too-predictable, and outlining the things that ordinary citizens can do by way of self-protection to hedge against it and enhance their finances. The first topic of discussion will be government mismanagement of the money supply and the […]
57 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
Barbara Oakley, who earlier in life was a self-confessed “mathphobe” now describes herself as an “educator, writer, engineer.” She excelled at humanities courses in high school and college, but failed at math and science. Yet, when the occasion arose much later in her life in which she needed to acquire basic technical competency, she set […]
29 min read
It may seem strange for a money and business website like Expensivity.com to present this interview about college rankings and the problems they raise. But these academic rankings are big business, and the actual school ranking lists that they produce have significant business and financial implications for the schools listed, especially depending on where they […]
20 min read
What is cryptocurrency? Should cryptocurrency be part of your investment strategy? We cut through a lot of the hype and complexity surrounding cryptocurrency so that you can understand the risks, the benefits, and the opportunities in this emergent system of alternative currency and exchange. In the simplest terms, crypto tokens are virtual currencies that can be used to make transactions without passing through conventional centralized financial entities or institutions like banks, stockbrokers or exchanges. The idea behind this decentralized financial (DeFi) system is to create a form of financial transaction that is at once more secure and transparent than traditional finance and, simultaneously, more private, more accessible, and less beholden to fees or regulations than traditional finance.
11 min read
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 […]
11 min read
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 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
