Viewing profile — therpe1

The idea that every economy can be hyper-competitive is absurd. There are winners and losers, those who produce surplus and those who produce deficits. The question is what to do w…

That's the narrative the media is pushing only in your head. It's obvious you have no respect for the truth but please don't insult the rest of us by misrepresenting easily googlea…

Who cares...? Really, you've got to wonder why, for such "hardscrabble," "salt of the earth" people we keep getting thousands of words and photographs that blame all their problems…

Because nobody but dumb people on the internet actually cares where the gold is stored. Since 1971 gold, along with every other commodity, has been optionalized. It doesn't matter …

As usual, "the right" likes to speak of "incentives" like they are these magical fairies that overdetermine human behavior. Let's look at some actual facts in the real world. Compa…

Ebook prices are set to be artificially high by publishers in order to prop up the paper business. It's a strategy that has strongly diminishing returns and doesn't make much sense…

> Its very surprising that people argue about these businesses in the hypothetical. I think this is standard operating procedure for conservatives. They provide extremely speculati…

There's very little evidence that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. If there was meaningful evidence the investigators would receive the Nobel Prize -- every year. And while econ…

The article has some good points but the whole "crowd" thing was never a serious idea. Crowds are not intelligent. Democracies are what are intelligent. Having lots of intelligent …

I kind of marvel at such comments. You don't understand a single sentence so you give up on the whole article? And then you feel the need to announce your ignorance? The entire art…

Exactly. This article is naive to think there's something special about IT. All the mental gymnastics in the world can't avoid what is a pretty obvious truth: women in Eastern Euro…

You seem to have a very rosy idea of Russian society which is no doubt colored by your opinions of Western culture. At least the Russians I know would laugh at the idea of "calling…

Maven is great. Not perfect but it's far better than the alternatives. And every single time I've seen somebody come along and insist they have a better alternative the result is a…

It's another way of saying the labor market is weak. (I can imagine certain economists might use this language because they don't want to be mistaken for labor advocates.) As long …

This idea that government is responsible for the scarcity of housing is dishonest. It's called democracy . The government is made up of the people who live there. The citizens of S…

Living with your parents is the norm. Countries like France and the USA are abnormal in that virtually nobody lives with their parents and doing so is widely regarded as some kind …

That article is long and completely without substance. I don't know why I didn't turn back sooner but lesson learned. Anybody who thinks the drug industry charges so much for "inno…

Um, no, the tax payers pay for it through Medicaid. People seem to have very strange ideas about how the healthcare industry actually works. But it's not a secret, you can go look …

America needs to embrace "local government." That means devolving budgetary power to the states. The federal model has failed. The current system is broken. The people who pay the …

It's weird. This article is so poorly informed and, frankly, straight-up dumb that I'm surprised that the author would put it out there under his real name. But what's more surpris…

> So then how do you deal with people with such beliefs in your society? Do you shun them, throw slurs at them? What happens when one moves in to be your next-door neighbor? Do you…

This is a distinction without difference. No meaningful line can be drawn between "belief" and "behavior." Somebody who holds hateful beliefs will act on those beliefs whether it's…

The Times is on a role. First we get to hear about "The Myth of Main St."[1] and now it turns out the gig economy is a lie. What a bummer. It is interesting though how quickly the …

It's not "negative connotations" -- there are in fact enormous opportunity costs for such low-skilled, seasonal work. Nobody in their right mind would spend 10 hours a day kneeling…