Economics, technology, and how we think.
But the New Deal’s electrical reformers aimed for something even bigger than an economic stimulus to relieve farmers and put workers back in business. They hoped to use this program to heal a cultural rift between urban and rural America that had been widening for decades, as city populations boomed, rural villages dwindled, and many …
Continue reading “Electricity, the New Deal, and America’s urban-rural divide”
Another post from Age of Edison: Defending these new regulations [on electric light], the progressive reformers pointed to Europe’s example. Governments there had played a more active role in controlling the development of the electric industry. National laws encouraged municipal ownership of utilities and set standards for all electrical work, drawn up by leading scientists and …
Continue reading “Who gets credit for America’s adoption of electricity?”
More from Age of Edison, on why the U.S. surpassed Europe in invention: Europeans often conceded that Americans displayed a remarkable aptitude for invention, particularly in the field of labor-saving devices. The country had not produced many philosophers, as one Englishman put it, “but her practical men may be numbered by the hundreds. If a Yankee …
In Chapter 21 of Thinking, Fast and Slow Dan Kahneman discusses the frequent superiority of algorithms over intuition. He documents a wide range of studies showing that algorithms tend to beat expert intuition in areas such as medicine, business, career satisfaction and more. In general, the value of algorithms tends to be in “low-validity environments” …
Two things are indisputably true of Tyler Cowen: he has an interesting mind, and he has an economist’s mind. This struck me as I was reading Chapter 4 of Create Your Own Economy, titled ‘IM, Cell Phones, and Facebook’. It’s a quirky (and occasionally funny) chapter about how our choice of communication platform impacts our …
I’m reading Tyler Cowen’s book Create Your Own Economy and I’ll be posting thoughts and snippets as I go. Here’s Cowen on the new cultural literacy: What cultural literacy means today is not whether you can “read” all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone and other web-related technologies. …
beyond the times 