I highly recommend this episode of Econtalk with Matt Ridley talking about how innovation makes inventions useful by making them available, affordable and reliable. The Academy of Ideas podcast is a good overview of the book’s key points about how innovation works and made me feel that I probably didn’t need to read it. This excellent interview with Russ Roberts…
Tag: Russ Roberts
This extract is from is a great Econtalk discussion of How the Other Half Learns. Recommend. Robert Pondiscio: They [Success Academy Charter Schools] require an extraordinary level of parent commitment both in time and responsiveness. And it just seems pointless to deny that for some number of parents, this is simply too much. I want to be clear here that…
The thing that I’m recommending for a lot of people now is to find a sphere of activity, no matter how small or how local, that you feel you can control and you can do at home and you can contribute to. This feeling of powerlessness may set in that will cause people to panic more or become too depressed…
Rule 12. Be Kind – everyone is in a battle We go through life judging others. I’ve often wondered if one of the reasons we sometimes judge ourselves harshly is to give ourselves an excuse for judging those around us harshly as well. Judging has many virtues. It helps us decide who to spend time with, who to work with,…
I’ve been reflecting on this theme for the last few days, and I teared up when I came across this. HT: Russ Roberts, here.
Our age right now – this might change – is obsessed with inequality. And it disturbs me deeply that inequality is conflated with poverty. They’re not the same thing. A lot of people blame the condition of the poor on inequality as if the world was a zero sum game. If you press the person who says that [they’ll say]…
“What am I hoping to get?” Once we’ve admitted to ourselves that we’re doing our work (at least partly) for ourselves, we can think more clearly about our motives by asking “What am I hoping to get from doing this?” And we’re probably hoping to get several things: the knowledge that we’ve helped someone, the satisfaction of a job well…
This is a fantastic interview that takes Andy Matuschak‘s controversially titled essay as a springboard for a not-really-controversial but fascinating discussion of teaching, learning and tech informed by Matuschak’s work at Kahn Academy. Highly recommend. Highlights to follow.
This is a great episode of Econtalk. Bertaud uses labour markets as a lens for thinking about cities. Helpful examples of emergent order and the challenges (impossibility?) of planning in complex adaptive systems. Highlights (coming up) include: Discussion of the importance of culture and context in how cities develop; Bertaud’s explanation of his broader-than-usual understanding of labour markets; When planning…
This is a great introduction (or reminder) about emergent order in the complex adaptive system that is the economy.