Tag: Books
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Bell’s Inequality
I recently finished Quantum Computing for Everyone, which is a great intro to the basic ideas and math behind quantum computing. I particularly enjoyed its account of Bell’s inequality, which offers a great lesson in the history of science. In the early 20th century, physicists worked out the core of…
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Rawls’ Theology and *The Devil Wears Prada*
I liked this tweet from Zohar Atkins the other day. What Anne Hathaway’s character missed is how her world, the water she swims in, is downstream of the deliberate creations of artists, which are in turn the result of ideas from others that influenced those artists and so on. I…
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The Economics of Whaling Excursions
I recently picked up Moby-Dick for the first time and have been enjoying learning about the economics of whaling excursions. For example, apparently retired ship captains would provide financing for a portfolio of ships, getting a stake for annuitants who weren’t involved with the day-to-day of investing, and would add…
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Fortuna and Facebook
In the early consumer web days, venture firms started investing in businesses that looked very different from the kinds of businesses they were used to. Apparently Accel in particular had some problems building conviction in the new crop of startups In the end, “Skype looked too weird to us,” [Kevin]…
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Liberalism and Desire
Immanuel Kant gets a reputation for having an especially austere theory of the good life. Anyone who has taken an intro to philosophy class might point to his argument that one should never lie, even to a murderer at the door, as an example of the peculiarity of his moral…
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Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost”
I recently had occasion to read Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost”. Coase’s really radical idea in the paper is the economic symmetry of responsibility in property disputes. According to Coase, when two people’s preferences collide, each is equally responsible for the suboptimal outcome. The chocolate gets in the peanut…
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Philosophy and VC
As I was reading Mallaby’s The Power Law, I was tickled to learn that Paul Graham gave his iconic “How to Start a Startup” lecture in Emerson Hall at Harvard. Although the lecture was for the Harvard Computer Society, it was delivered in the philosophy building. And Graham himself was…
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VC Mythology and Branding
Sebastian Mallaby on the origins of venture capital: Rock and Coyle met Kleiner and his comrades at a San Francisco restaurant for dinner. The visitors from Wall Street understood that the rebels wanted to operate as a team, without Shockley’s suffocating oversight. They further understood that the engineers wanted to…
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*Le Mage du Kremlin*
I recently finished reading Le Mage du Kremlin. It was the runner-up in the big French book contest last year and received acclaim for its literary analysis of Putin in particular and power and politics in Russia more generally. Given the discourse around the book, I was pretty surprised by…
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Review of “An Eduction for Our Time”
I. Colleges are in a precarious position. Student debt is skyrocketing as critics like Bryan Caplan make an increasingly persuasive case that college offers little beyond a credential to students and even less to society. Meanwhile, alternatives to college like the Thiel fellowship, coding bootcamps, and online education are becoming…
Matthew Mandel 