In the 2006 Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, the dumbed-down human population five-hundred years into the future have replaced water in drinking fountains with the salty sports drink “Brawndo,” and have even begun to water farm crops with Brawndo. Facing a nationwide...
A recent article in Fortune speaks to a computer scientist named Andrew Chien who asserts that the new wave of OpenAI data centers will be consuming as much energy as New York City and San Diego combined when they are operating at full capacity during extreme weather....
In a recent interview with Nathan Goodman of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Professor Michael Clemens, a GMU specialist in migration economics, put forth "a strange and striking fact about the world economy." A lower-skilled person's location in the...
With Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve beginning a cutting cycle, it is worth revisiting why the Feds manipulation of interest rates is not a harmless (if misguided) technocratic tool for attempting to “fine-tune” the economy, but is instead a source of deep...
“We candlemakers are suffering from the unfair competition of a foreign rival, whose production costs are so low that he floods our market with light at a price far below ours…This rival is none other than the sun.”- Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (1845) Frédéric...
From about 1800 to the present the world's economy did something good, which looks to be permanent and looks to be justified. If contrary to the evidence we cling to our prejudices about economic history—our view that the Industrial Revolution was improverishng, or...
For at least 200 years, classical liberals (aka libertarians) have warned that the more power the government wields, the greater the lengths people will go to get their hands on it before their ideological opponents do. This is not rocket science, yet resistance to...
[R]elative shares in national income have remained substantially constant over the last hundred years. This, however, is true only if we measure them in money. Measured in real terms, relative shares have substantially changed in favor of the lower income groups. This...
