introduction picture this: you get a 100$ gift card for a store you don't really like. you'd prefer the cash, so you could spend it however you want. this is a simple example of what economists call "deadweight loss." in this blog post, we'll use the "gift card fallacy" to help…

The term "marketerian" has been proposed to represent a fundamental belief in markets and optimal tax theory. It advocates for taxes that have negative or neutral deadweight loss, such as a carbon tax and a land value tax, respectively. In addition, it advocates for a basic income as a means…

there’s a pernicious myth out there, often claimed by georgists, that land value taxes would effectively have negative deadweight loss because they’d encourage more productive use of land. i’ve voluminously debunked this myth, as have many others. unfortunately, Jeremiah Johnson, a co-founder of the neoliberal project, and a person for…

introduction — people often debate whether it's possible to sum individual utilities to create a social utility. there are many traditional arguments against this idea, usually materialist in nature, claiming that utility should ultimately be quantifiable, like the number of dopamine molecules in one's brain. however, for practical purposes, we can avoid…

many people mistakenly assume that the concept of utility is a meaningless tautology. they believe it's both the thing we're trying to optimize and the thing we're trying to measure. however, this is a fundamental misunderstanding. utility can be expressed as a significant mathematical concept with practical applications. let's imagine…

most companies scale teams and “territory” (namely, codebases) in an unstructured, evolutionary, ad hoc way. i once watched a talk about scaling while staying agile, and it inspired me to illustrate this with a specific hypothetical structure. let’s say we have an organization which can have one or more services…

i recently encountered a stridently market-denying leftist on twitter, and i think their common misconceptions of economics are instructive. at one point i asked: suppose bob and alice have their lottery assigned homes, assigned by you, and they talk and realize they’d prefer each other’s house. should they be allowed…

i often see typescript enums used as constraints for redux actions and the like. for example: enum ActionTypes { GO = 'GO', STOP = 'STOP', } export const goAction = createAction(ActionTypes.GO, (resolve) => { return (payload?: any) => resolve(payload); }); function funcThatAcceptsAnAction(action: ActionTypes) { ... } it would be far…

“cost” is defined as an amount that has to be paid or spent to buy or obtain something. suppose you can buy a cookie at the local bakery for 3$. the cost of that cookie is thus, by definition, 3$. that’s what you pay to obtain it. but what if…