I love teaching, but no longer have a class of MBA candidates to teach each week. To make up for that, I answer questions on Quora. A few months ago I posted some of my most popular answers. Here are some more: Topic: Startups Why do so many startups fail?What aspects of the financial statements should an entrepreneur care most about when starting a business?How do you complete a bottom’s...
What are the negative consequences of large government deficits? Often the “aha moments” of understanding economics come in the midst of reading articles in The Economist. Not usually from the actual words, but from some fact coupled with flashbacks of learnings from all the books I’ve been reading. The latest of those was from an article in the November 2nd magazine, talking...
Michael Lewis is the author of The Big Short and a rare storyteller who can convey complex economic topics as stories with interesting characters and plots. Boomerang tells stories in and around the financial meltdown (a.k.a. Panic) of 2008-2009, but for Americans these are mostly the far less discussed stories of Iceland, Greece, Ireland, and Germany. The fact that Iceland was able (within a...
I came across this article and its opening line in MIT Technology Review: The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms.MIT Technology Review I said something similar in a blog post 18 months ago, What if 99% of success is luck? And given the craziness of WeWork in the news, this idea that success is due more to luck than...
