Micro Softy 71: Strange Economics
A numbers' game at the hardware storeGreat nerds are able to grasp deeper meanings. So here is this week’s Micro Softy about an overheard conversation.
Read More ›CategoryEconomics
A Lack of Transparency Threatens AI — and the American Economy
Even the Wall Street Journal does not appear to understand the nature of the looming problemsAI software startups should be required to release audited numbers so that we can at least understand the current state of the AI economy.
Read More ›
COSM 2025: Publisher Steve Forbes’ Take On National Debt Crisis
He will be one of the participants in a panel discussion on That Unpleasant Subject at COSM 2025 in Scottsdale, Arizona, in November this yearTwo other panelists are Chapman University’s Mark Skousen and John Tamny, author of The Deficit Delusion (2025). George Gilder will moderate.
Read More ›
If China Wins the Blockchain Derby, a Global Chill Will Follow
COSM 2025: While the West fusses about cryptocurrencies, China aims at building a blockchain to control the global internet. And few pay attention…DoD Chief Strategy Officer Jinyoung Englund will be speaking on what control by China would mean and whether the United States can catch up.
Read More ›
International Tribunals Grant Rights to Nature, Restrict Energy
This means restricting fossil fuel development, including in areas where people are currently living in destitutionThe vaunted international community is going all-in on radical environmentalism that, if enacted widely, would gut human prosperity.
Read More ›
Erik J. Larson Reviews Sobering Recent Book on AI Shaping Society
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, he examines the ideas in Robert Sidelsky’s recent book, Mindless - and their implicationsSidelsky, Larson tells us, thinks our problems stem not from the machines themselves but from the stories we’ve told about them.
Read More ›
The Job Market is Telling Us Something About AI and Jobs…
But it’s not telling us the same things as the AI hypesters are telling usThe job market for recent college grads may be warning us that participation trophies for college and ChatGPT use have long-run costs.
Read More ›
Why LLMs Are Not Boosting Productivity
If LLMs were as reliably useful as economist Tyler Cowen alleges, businesses would be using them to generate profits faster than LLMs generate text. They aren’t.So far, AI is dragging down economic growth by diverting so much human talent and natural resources away from more productive uses.
Read More ›
Sloppy Science is a Statistical Sin
Evidence of sloppy science encourages readers to wonder if the entire research project is compromisedJournals should require authors to make their data available online before publication and encourage others to try to replicate the research they publish.
Read More ›
COSM: Ethernet Inventor Asks, Are We Ready for New IT Technology?
Bob Metcalfe will talk about new technologies like electromagnetic waves from the “dead zone” of the spectrum that are slowly becoming economically viableMetcalfe’s Law of IT growth begins with the fact that one fax machine — for example — is useless. Two help a bit but millions of them made a difference.
Read More ›
The Government-Debt Tipping Point Is Nonsense
There are serious problems with the economics paper by Reinhart and Rogoff, whose recommendations were widely followedReinhart/Rogoff’s dismissal of criticism of their deeply flawed study as “academic kerfuffle” is unconscionably cavalier.
Read More ›
How can someone who fails be faulted when everyone else is failing?
Market turbulence can cause endowment fund managers to travel with the herd — sacrifice returns in order to reduce annual volatilityThe current, widely-favored 60/40 strategy has little or nothing to recommend it beyond the fact that it is what everyone else is doing.
Read More ›
What We Can Learn From the Crowdstrike Fiasco
A lot of things that we try to do to remove risk actually make the problem worse — but also less visibleSaving effort in the short term by running these risks is a decision that should be made with full knowledge of how near-term decisions affect long-term risks.
Read More ›
Tech Industry: Are the Unicorns an Endangered Species?
The canaries are cheeping loudly that new tech startup funding is fadingHow serious the current downturn will be, they say, depends on how long the current AI bubble lasts. Winter always comes, just not when many of us expect it.
Read More ›
LLMs Can’t Be Trusted for Financial Advice
The LLM responses demonstrated that they do not have the common sense needed to recognize when their answers are obviously wrongIt takes an experienced financial planner to distinguish between good and bad advice, so clients may as well skip the LLMs and go to the knowledgeable human.
Read More ›
Why Are Some Retail Stores Ditching Self-Checkout?
Rising theft rates are a key motivator but other problems have arisen, like preventing alcohol sales to minorsBrand marketing strategist Melinda Deines points to a study that shows that self-checkouts cause shoppers to view theft differently.
Read More ›
Economics Assumes Human Beings Have Free Will
Every waking moment we humans live out a constant fact underlying all economic science: we act.“Free will denial is a cornerstone of materialist–determinist ideology,” wrote Dr. Michael Egnor here in February 2024. The deniers say we are “purely physical machines, meat robots.” Dr. Egnor cited well-known people who have prominently denied humans have free will. Dr. Egnor challenged deniers to demonstrate through their own actions that they truly have no free will. They will fail for Dr. Egnor’s stated reasons, plus one more: economics. The science of economics describes the behaviors of individual humans as they pursue their lives. Economics has discovered certainties, such as the Law of Supply and Demand, that describe how people produce, consume, trade, save, invest, and anticipate the future. Economics succeeds because it grasps certain universal truths about free-will, non-material, Read More ›
Retracted Paper Is a Compelling Case for Reform
The credibility of science is being undermined by misuse of the tools created by scientists. Here's an example from an economics paper I was asked to comment onIn my book Distrust (Oxford 2023), I recommend that journals not publish data-driven research without public access to nonconfidential data and methods used.
Read More ›
How Data Can Appear in Science Papers — Out of Thin Air!
At Retraction Watch, Gary Smith explains how one author team apparently copy pasted missing data about green innovation in various countriesRecently, Retraction Watch, a site that helps keeps science honest, noted some statistical peculiarities about a paper last September in the Journal of Clean Energy, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” The site was tipped off by a PhD student in economics that “For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent.” But that wasn’t the big surprise. The big surprise was when the student wrote to one of the authors: In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, [Almas] Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values Read More ›
Full-Time: Why We Need More Creative Productivity, Not Less
A new book shows how we lost the meaning of work and the ways we can get back on track.Bahnsen subscribes to the classical view of economics that prizes production over consumption.
Read More ›