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...

Startups add an average of 3 million jobs in their first year, while older companies lose 1 million jobs annually. (ref) Without startups, job growth in the US would be negative 1.2 percent. (ref) Angel investments created 370,000 U.S. jobs in 2010, nearly half of the private sector jobs created that year....

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...

(Back from Alex’s European adventures) Michael Martin of Broken Symmetry with two incredibly insightful posts on Soros’ theory of reflexivity, distinction between social and physical sciences, and the ability of markets to regulate us as well as themselves. 1. “Are markets flawed? Or is it...

Michael Martin (Broken Symmetry) discussed Didier Sornette group’s prediction that the Shanghai Composite was a bubble and would pop between July 17th and July 27th.  The prediction was a few days off, but the lines fit so we must acquit… at least to (by) a degree (insert line about OJ here). I applaud...

NPR’s On The Media recently had a series of interesting segments on the future of the internet: 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 browser. A theme that ran through...

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...

I’ve been having a serious discussion with two colleagues of mine about closing the gap that exists between two groups: People of my generation (40 and older) who have capital they want to invest in innovation but only know the VC for-profit-only value model and don’t have any true view into or...

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the future prospects of Facebook and Twitter. Some of us even feel strongly enough to want to bet on it. Unfortunately, the companies are privately held, and unavailable to be bet on in the traditional way, via the stock market. It is not just household names like...

The Freakonomics guys have been on this rant for years, and until recently, I agreed with their logic.  But the mounting evidence (in my mind) is starting to swing the other way. ...

I have been having a 140 character discussion with Ciarán Brewster (@macbruski) via twitter.  And while it’s kind of interesting to force complex subject matter into very few characters, it is limiting the discussion, so I will summarize it so far here and hopefully others can weigh in too. ...

A friend pointed me to a doubly prescient talk given by George Soros in 1994 about his theory of reflexivity in the markets.  Essentially Soros notes that there’s feedback in terms of what agents believe about the market and how the market behaves.  Not groundbreaking, but he takes this thinking to...

I’m giving my “2009 Q1 award for most concise, lucid comment” to Paul Phillips for this gem: Viewed from a thousand miles, the financial system has a incalculably large incentive to fail catastrophically as frequently as it can do so without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. As...

One problem facing financial institutions is not knowing what the Mortgage Backed Securities they hold are worth. One problem facing homeowners is that the abandoned and unmaintained house beside them is dragging down the value of their property. An anecdotal story from Modesto, Ca has two neighbors getting...

A few articles on the economy that were sent my way recently. The Good: After Capitalism (Geoff Mulgan) “The era of transition that we are entering will be disruptive—but it may bring a world where markets are servants, not masters.”  I urge you to read this entire article, and leave your...

With his permission, I am posting an email thread between myself and Alfred Hubler.  I had contacted him on the recommendation of John Miller when Kevin and I were posting on the possibility of dampening boom-bust cycles in the financial markets through policy or other mechanisms.  Here’s what Hubler...

I asked this question on twitter/facebook and got a lot of variants of “I agree” and only one person who stated disagreement (but provided inadequate reason, IMO).  Jay Greenspan put it this way: Interesting question this morning, and something I’ve been wondering about. I’ve yet to...

1) The Quiet Coup The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes...

I have a bet with a friend that Dow will exceed 14,000 at least once by October 12, 2012 (he says it won’t). Click here to make your prediction on what year that will take place. Comment below on why you think what you...

In a March 2009 Wired article, Daniel Roth calls for radical transparency in financial reporting as the path to recovery and a more secure financial system.  He argues that the reporting requirements today allow companies to obscure what’s going on and that the way to fix things is as follows.  ...

Apropos of Rafe’s last post on Complexity Economics, I ran across an economic stability proposal that is either brilliant or crazy. I both haven’t thought it over enough and am probably not qualified to determine which. ...

In Chasing the Dragon, I wondered aloud whether we could dampen boom-bust cycles in the financial system with an economic equivalent of a controlled burn.  Kevin suggested that “generic countercyclical policies” might work.  Underlying both mine and Kevin’s thinking is the idea that you...

Kevin just posted about a great article by Felix Salmon in Wired.  I underlined three quotes in my reading of it: “Correlation trading has spread through the psyche of the financial markets like a highly infectious thought virus.” (Tavakoli) “…the real danger was created not because...

Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, an excellent article in Wired about how one formula, embodying one assumption, catalyzed the meltdown.  I recommend you read it and ponder it.  There are many useful lessons for modeling complex systems in general. However, I will summarize for those of you short on...

How Our Moral Compasses Fail Us From the comments on my Introduction to this series, it appears I have discovered a controversial topic. Good. My first objective will be to illustrate why we cannot rely on  moral compasses to guide society. After some thought, I have decided to break the topic of moral...