Here are some things I used to believe: The power of the free market comes from competition If you are nice to someone, you will be rewarded commensurately A penny saved is a penny earned The more scarce something is the more valuable it is I no longer believe these statements to be true.  To understand...

[NOTE: I updated this post with more detailed examples] Background: part 3, part 2 and part 1. In the interview with Jon Gunn in Part 3, I mention that I’ve been thinking of what “version 2″ of the Personal Investment Contract might look like.  Here’s the model: Investment Amount...

For the background to this post, start with part 2 and part 1.  The follow up is part 4. I get a lot of questions from folks who are interested in learning more about Personal Investment Contracts and so I felt it was time to synthesize some of the most common ones and give you some answers. Who is the...

Complex Adaptive Monetary Policy (CAMP) is, in essence, a reconciliation of Keynes’ top-down view of macroeconomics with Hayek’s bottom up view.  The particular details of the proposed policy below are not as important as the recognition of the fundamental forces at play and empirical evidence...

For the background to this post, start with part 1.  The follow up is here: part 3, part 4. In a subsequent post, I’ll talk about some lessons we’ve learned.  In the mean time, what questions would you have, either as a prospective investor or investee in the above...

Several years ago I became aware of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “AI-Box Experiment” in which he plays the role of a transhuman “artificial intelligence” and attempts (via dialogue only) to convince a human “gatekeeper” to let him out of a box in which he is being contained...

On Tuesday I went on Annie Duke’s internet TV show to talk with her and Jason Calacanis about Wikileaks and what the implications are for the future of privacy.  I made some radical claims: Privacy is dead: it’s only a matter of time now before we all have to face this eventuality. In a...

Today, Rafe and I launched new angel fund aimed at for-profit social entrepreneurs. It’s called Presumed Abundance and it’s going to make people think about what it really means to invest in people. Have a look. Let us know what you...

“Less expensive, lower-quality innovations abound in every economic sector—except medicine” This is by far the most constructive article on healthcare, because it clearly identifies the fundamental issue in healthcare – our internal conflict.  Here are the excerpts, but read the whole...

Inspired by the X Prize, Y Combinator’s “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” and Kickstarter, I am offering a $100K prize in three parts: $10K for Crowdsourced X Prizes Platform Allows anyone to offer a cash prize for achieving a goal they want achieved Allows anyone to pledge...

This was one of my favorites of the...

As most of you probably know, Worldmapper had dozens of charts that scale country size to various statistics.  Here are three maps I haven’t seen in other blogs, but found interesting and would love to hear what people think about the reasons and implications (and of course how...

Rick Bookstaber, author of “A Demon of Our Own Design” and Senior Policy Adviser at the SEC has hit the nail on the head as far as the bank reform goes – Breaking the Banks (via Infectious Greed): “It is not the case that the largest banks are the same as other banks, just bigger“ “The largest...

Please watch the Zeitgeist Addendum, and RIP: Remix Manifesto Kafka gave us The Metamorphosis.  We have the power to realize our own humility.  Being wrong is irrelevant if you learn from your mistakes and prevent systemic risk from such errors.  How can we be so content with our wisdom if we continually...

-”Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Churchill (from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)  I’ve been meaning to do a post on the Bayesian Truth Serum (Prelec), but Tyler Cowen’s post on Range...

This is the first in a four part series.  The other are here:  part 2, part 3, part 4. Imagine you are in your early twenties, out of college several years and your best friend, who recently came into an inheritance of $300K cash told you they could think of no better way to invest the money than to...

If you liked this, check out these posts: Behavioral Economics with Dan Ariely Management 2.0 Executive Compensation World’s Most Ambitious Crowdsource My Favorite TED Talks of TED...

I was listening today to a Fresh Air interview from a couple of weeks ago on the reasons for the high cost of health care: Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your...

The following quotes are from a book describing a real set of events: [The incident] is an extraordinary example of what happens when you get… a dozen people with an average IQ of 160… working in a field in which they collectively have 250 years of experience… employing a ton of...

It is by now common wisdom that our current financial crisis is due in large part to misplaced incentives in our financial system. Analysts and fund managers were rewarded for short-term thinking and risk-taking. If we can rework our financial system to reward long-term, careful planning, it is often...

I just tweeted on a subject that I suspected would cause a stir, and so it has, I’m moving it here: RafeFurst: I strongly support a soda tax! RT @mobilediner: check it out:  a Soda Tax? http://amplify.com/u/dvl coelhobruno: @RafeFurst what about diet soda? Would it be exempt? RafeFurst: @coelhobruno...

Who wants to pay for email? You just might. Many people have suggested that adding a nominal cost to e-mail would serve to fight spam by rendering it largely unprofitable. With Centmail, some Yahoo researchers propose adding a penny postage stamp to each e-mail, representing a penny donation to charity....

What’s fascinating to me about this is not that it works so well and or that there might actually be support in the Obama administration for doing it on a national scale, but rather that there has not been a backlash against it yet.  What are the odds that something like this will actually get...

Everyone has heard about the Large Hadron Collider, arguably the most ambitious and complex engineering project ever undertaken, anywhere.  The purpose, no less ambitious, is to answer all sorts of burning questions about the nature of the universe, including whether the Standard Model of particle physics...

Short but brilliant TED talk by Joachim de Posada.  I love the economic point he makes at the...