The news recently that the 1,400-foot pencil tower at 432 Park Avenue is facing severe structural issues because the architect used the wrong kind of concrete causes one to question yet again the joys of big city living. Apartments in that building go for $30 million or so, for which you could buy a very […]

Gold’s rapid price rise through $4,000 illustrates the collapse of conventional fiat currencies. Rather than look at gold’s rise, you should consider the dollar’s fall, with $1,000 dropping from 1 ounce of gold as recently as 2016 to 0.24 ounces today. Other fiat currencies have behaved similarly to that 76% decline over the last decade. […]

Song Dynasty China was a model of intellectual advance, that might well have started the Industrial Revolution half a millennium early. After a destabilizing century of foreign Mongol rule, China’s next dynasty, the Ming, was thoroughly intellectually retrograde, closing China off from the world, imposing a rigid Confucian orthodoxy and shutting out ideas that questioned […]

Free trade economists are very fond of quoting David Ricardo’s (1772-1823) principle of Comparative Advantage, first expounded in his “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” in 1817. Ricardo was one of our greatest economists, but his principle of Comparative Advantage, like much of modern mathematical economics, rested on shaky assumptions and thus had […]