Tag: Economics
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Sociology of NGDP Targeting
What’s the right sociological explanation for the wonky transpartisan takes that have become identity- and community-forming memes online? YIMBYism was maybe the first of these. NGDP targeting seems to be a more recent one. Is the internet just so vast and politics so polarizing that there’s an online community for…
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Towards a Theory of Decentralization
One force that drives centralization is comparative advantage. If I’m sufficiently good at making clothes, it might be mutually advantageous for me to focus on making clothes all day and to free up the person who’s good at making food to do that and the person who’s good at building…
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Intimate Social Networks
Why haven’t big consumer businesses been built around the Find My Friends’ (FMF) location-sharing primitive? Lots of people my age share their location with as many as tens of people. The behavior has caught on despite no marketing or real productization from Apple. Location feels like a powerful piece of…
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Friday Links
“You must never lose gratitude for this privileged position that you put each other in.”
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On Fandom
From Tyler Cowen’s new book on the history of economic thinkers: Do you want to know which single book probably is the biggest influence on this one? It is the Bill Simmons 2009 book The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy. I loved that book and…
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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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New Cities
I think new city projects are fascinating. Although it’s definitely hard to start a new community from scratch (especially from the top-down), greater experimentation can help unearth better ways to live together that we can all learn from and might push existing cities to improve lest their residents move away.…
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Optimizing SSBM
I had a friend in college who was a competitive Super Smash Bros Melee player. Though I’d played Smash before, I realized that the casual play I was used to is a different game altogether. It turns out there are many ways to exploit the game’s relatively simple physics to…
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Tradle
After seeing a bunch of people on fintwit talk about it, I’ve recently gotten into playing Tradle. Like Wordle, Tradle is a daily guessing game. Instead of guessing words, however, you have to guess countries based on their exports with warm/cold feedback based on their location. I’m by no means…
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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…
Matthew Mandel 