Mental Model: Information Asymmetry For the past month or two, there has been a running joke at the office that I’ve been giving Aaron a hard time about, providing me countless hours of entertainment. It is a good illustration of a mental model from economics called information asymmetry and I thought I’d take five minutes…
Today’s mail bag letter comes from Sjberkely who writes: I was reading one of your blog entries and found it to be misleading. I hope you are able to correct the problem. Below are some facts that should help explain the system a bit more clearly. You should know that people are in a state…
I’ve been talking a lot about trust funds lately. I calculated that if someone put $50,000 in a trust fund today, 70 years from now, they could have a dynasty trust paying each of their heirs a $25,000 cash check (in today’s dollars, net of taxes) at Christmas. There are a lot of assumptions that may not pan out in that figure, but it’s a decent guess.
According to a new story out by the Associated Press and posted on Yahoo, “Blacks struggle with a 72 percent unwed mothers rate”, the out-of-wedlock pregnancy crisis in the United States has become unfathomable with single mother pregnancies accounting for between 17% of pregnancies in Asians to 72% of pregnancies in African Americans. Why should…
Three weeks ago, Dylan sent me a message and asked the following (see below). This is my response. I’ve been meaning for a long time to ask what you specifically think someone in my position- a young person just leaving high school and entering college- should do to end up in a position similar to…
Bizarre but true results of several recent studies on human behavior: Turns out, women have no clue that a vast majority of men regularly consume pornography even while in relationships and religious affiliation increases the per capita consumption of pornography, perhaps due to the forbidden fruit aspect of repression. Furthermore, the more pornography available to citizens, the more drastically rape cases decline. The findings shocked the researchers behind the studies.
Did the Founders Intend for There To Be a Separation of Church and State in the United States? A friend from college and I have been discussing whether the separation of church and state is what the founders intended and whether it is a good or bad thing for society. After a few years of studying…