It’s way worse than you think and way way worse than you want it to be.
Wealth Inequality in America
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It’s way worse than you think and way way worse than you want it to be.
The last time I found a book explaining the workings of a stock exchange was literally called The Work of the Stock Exchange, describing the New York Stock Exchange in 1922. Confusion of Confusions is a bit older. 234 years older. Published in 1688, describing the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. One might assume that the first-ever stock exchange back in the 17th Century would be lacking most of the...
Why does Africa lag behind the rest of the world as measured by economic development? Why didn’t Africa follow along with the growth of the Asian Tigers, China, India, and Southeast Asia? What was missing? Joe Studwell gives a plausible explanation in his new book, How Africa Works. TL;DR, the answer is population density. That isn’t a factor that I had ever considered, as Africa...
For institutions whose ages are measured in centuries, the day-to-day inner workings of the stock exchanges are amazingly undocumented. I’ve asked numerous traders and others in the capital markets, and they all tell me they learned those details “on the job” from their peers. Almost a year ago I found The Work of the Stock Exchange, which did document quite a bit of the...
There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” (Twain). Wednesday, November 6th, and it feels a bit more repeat than rhyme. Eight years ago I posted Plan 11. It seems apt to reprise that post. 2016 Every event in Seattle this week seems to start with a lamentation of last week’s election results. Three days after posting about #lemonade and I’m getting more funny...
