It has become a truism that GDP is a bad measure of prosperity and growth. But I never hear any good replacement suggested. I thought that perhaps total annual land rent can be an alternative measure, since it goes up with wealth, then I read Terence Michael Dwyer's book Taxation: The Lost History,...

Epistemic status: hand waving but confidant. I was thinking about reflective reasoning and "strange loops through the meta level" and it led me to this intuition that even if you have to make some assumptions to support your beliefs, if your beliefs can be justified by various different sets o...

Alex Tabarok suggests improving crowdfunding by letting fundraisers offer a bonus as compensation for anyone that gets a refund if the project fails. By doing that the fundraiser solves the coordination problem making non-funding the equilibrium: if I think that you won’t contribute then I m...

From 1865 to 1909, Belgium was ruled by a great king. He helped promote the adoption of universal male suffrage and proportional-representation voting. During his rule Belgium rapidly industrialized and had immense economic growth. He gave workers the right to strike. He passed laws protecting women...