From a sworn legal document filed by John J. Ray III, the expert appointed CEO of FTX cryptocurrency company upon the November 11th resignation of major Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried: DECLARATION OF JOHN J. RAY III IN SUPPORT OF CHAPTER 11 PETITIONS AND FIRST DAY PLEADINGS I, John J. Ray III, hereby declare under penalty... Read More

From the New York Times opinion section: Ancient History Shows How We Can Create a More Equal World Nov. 4, 2021 By David Graeber and David Wengrow Mr. Graeber and Mr. Wengrow are the authors of the forthcoming book, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,� from which this essay is adapted. Mr.... Read More

This is a 2019 federal report, so it's not using the latest Census data, nor does it show the impact of covid, which couldn't be good, but it is still of interest. Here are total fertility rates for non-Hispanic white women by educational attainment: So white women with Master's degrees have 83% as many babies... Read More

The econosphere has been abuzz for several years with NYU professor Paul Romer's plan to bring the benefit of Good Institutions to Central America by building "charter cities" in the banana republic of Honduras. (Here's Romer's 2011 TED talk.) As economist Daron Acemoglu has explained, the only thing that differentiates a rich country from a... Read More

Asks Don Boudreau in the WSJ.My impression was that Friedman was a public admirer of Keynes.�(Here's a brief�video�of Friedman saying nice things about Keynes.)�John Maynard Keynes was, obviously, a genius. Bertrand Russell, who didn't like Keynes, said of him:None of this means that Keynes was necessarily right in his macroeconomics or that Keynes' self-proclaimed followers... Read More

Ron Unz has a big article in The American Conservative on a perennially interesting and important subject:Kenny claimed that such IQ t

Political scientist Elinor Ostrom has died. In 2009, she became the first woman winner in the four decades of the Economics quasi-Nobel Prize. She worked on the question of the various ways people arrange to avoid "the tragedy of the commons" of over-exploitation of common resources, such as fisheries.Jared Diamond notes that there are three... Read More

One century ago today, May 15, 1911, the Supreme Court upheld the federal government's lawsuit under the heretofore unused 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act against the Standard Oil near-monopoly in refining. The company founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller was broken up into 34 companies, including ones that eventually became Exxon and Mobil.Of course, today... Read More

Here's a long article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Paul Krugman's personality, such as it is. Economists have been called "worldly philosophers," but a lot of them come across as being awfully out of touch. For example, this article uses Krugman's long relationship with Larry Summers to help explain Krugman. By contrast to Krugman, when it... Read More

Paul Krugman still can't grasp why years of stupid investments cause inevitable recessions.Krugman denounces Arnold Kling's quasi-Austrian explanation of why busts occur. The reigning Nobel laureate proceeds to triumphantly zing Kling with what he thinks is a killer question:Yes, that's what Dr. Krugman wrote: Why doesn't a housing boom cause the same kind of unemployment... Read More

Much of the progress in improved efficiency in the last 50 years has come from reducing inventory. Holding inventory is expensive. You can't earn interest or dividends on goods you own. Plus, you have to pay to store it, keep track of it, find it, etc.The Just-in-Time manufacturing process made famous by Toyota focuses on... Read More

My first suggestion is that rather than hand out a new Nobel Prize in Economics this year, they instead take away one they gave to some economist in the past who now looks like a prime nitwit.If that's too radical, how about giving the Nobel to an economist who was actually, like, right? How about... Read More

Politicians control developers, so developers control politicians.My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

From Bloomberg News:It was the 26 toilets that triggered alarm among residents of Greenwich, Connecticut. "Who needs that many toilets?'' asked Charles Lee, who lives across the street from where Russian millionaire Valery Kogan proposes building a 54,000-square-foot (5,000-square- meter) mansion with that much plumbing.Kogan, chairman of East Line Group, which operates Moscow's Domodedovo International... Read More

I'm reminded of the spring of 1980 when the economy nosedived (nosedove?), but then suddenly pulled out of it into modest prosperity. It didn't save Jimmy Carter in November, and we ended up getting hammered by a major recession in 1981-1982 that painfully wrung the inflation of the 1970s out of the economy.My published articles... Read More