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World After Capital: Limits of Capitalism (Power Laws)
Albert Wenger – Jul 9, 2018
NOTE: Last week’s excerpt from World After Capital described how prices cannot exist for many of our most important attention allocation decisions. Today I describe how production functions with network effects result in power law distributions that have bad social [...] Read more
Happy 4th of July: Climate Edition
Albert Wenger – Jul 4, 2018
Independence Day is a cheesy summer action blockbuster. And yet, after watching it one can’t help but feel good about humanity defeating an existential threat using courage, technology and science (and doing so under American leadership). The irony today is [...] Read more
World After Capital: Limits of Capitalism (Intro & Missing Prices)
Albert Wenger – Jul 2, 2018
NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital starts to explain why capitalism cannot solve the problem of allocating attention which is scarce at the individual and collective levels. Capitalism has been extraordinarily successful. So much so that even communist countries [...] Read more
Uncertainty Wednesday: Updating (Beta Distribution)
Albert Wenger – Jun 27, 2018
It’s been six weeks since the last Uncertainty Wednesday, so I strongly suggest you go back first and read that post which provides an introduction to the idea of updating. Take your time, this new post won’t go away! The [...] Read more
Personal Responsibility in the Age of Trump
Albert Wenger – Jun 24, 2018
Yesterday, I tweeted that I considered Sarah Sanders tweet about being asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant an abuse of government power. Since I got quite a few questions on Twitter about that I want to elaborate the argument [...] Read more
Back (Well, Almost)
Albert Wenger – Jun 17, 2018
After nearly four weeks of not posting due to shoulder surgery I am almost back. I am saying almost because even though I can type very well again, I am spending a fair bit of time every day on physical [...] Read more
Shoulder Surgery
Albert Wenger – May 23, 2018
No Uncertainty Wednesday today. I had shoulder surgery yesterday to repair a rotator cuff injury. That means I won’t be able to type for quite a few days. I am creating this post using Voice on my Android phone. Impressively [...] Read more
World After Capital: Getting Past Capital (Attention)
Albert Wenger – May 21, 2018
NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital is about attention. It argues why attention is scarce in the sense of scarcity introduced earlier in the book. This section sets up the demands on attention and then talks about scarcity of [...] Read more
World After Capital: Getting Past Capital (Labor)
Albert Wenger – May 14, 2018
NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital is about labor. In it I describe what I call the “job loop” and how it has become central to both the economy and sadly also our view of human dignity. Before we [...] Read more