Category Archives: General Foolishness

It’s Not What it Looks Like

Posted on November 29, 2018 | Comments Off

According to Google, I was recently cited in an article on sandhillsexpress.com. It isn’t nearly as saucy as the URL implies.

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Posted in Economics, General Foolishness, Media Appearances, Trade

There’s a Metaphor in There Somewhere

Posted on October 30, 2018 | Comments Off

DCist: The National Zoo’s Naked Mole-Rats Still Have Not Chosen Their Queen

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Posted in Elections, General Foolishness, Uncategorized

Even Steve Jobs Hated Comcast’s Service

Posted on August 19, 2018 | Comments Off

Not everyone can call up a company’s CEO to bring up a complaint. But if you can, more power to you. Kudos to the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs for doing what so many of us wish we could:

During his recuperation, he signed up for Comcast’s high-definition cable service, and one day he called Brian Roberts, who ran the company. ‘I thought he was calling to say something nice about it,’ Roberts recalled. ‘Instead, he told me “It sucks.”

-Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 489.

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Posted in Books, General Foolishness, Uncategorized

Quality Insults in History

Posted on August 12, 2018 | Comments Off

Gibbon lobs a lot of quality insults in the Decline and Fall. Some of the best are hidden in his footnotes. Here is one from note 44 of Chapter XLVI, on p. 1534 of the edition I have:

[S]ee the Annals of Eutychius and the lamentations of the monk Antiochus, whose one hundred and twenty-nine homilies are still extant, if what no one reads may be said to be extant.

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Posted in Books, General Foolishness, History, Uncategorized

A Bit Drastic, But at Least They Correctly Identified the Problem

Posted on August 10, 2018 | Comments Off

A barbarous solution to the barbarous problem of over-legislation:

A Locrian who proposed any new law stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and, if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.

-Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, p. 1435.

I personally prefer peaceful solutions that reform the institutional rules that make over-legislating and over-regulation possible in the first place. But before the days of Douglass North and James Buchanan, this was apparently what people had to work with.

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Posted in Books, General Foolishness, Great Thinkers, History, regulation, Uncategorized

How to Change Trump’s Mind on Tariffs

Posted on August 6, 2018 | Comments Off

It turns out the word “tariff” is of Arabic origin, according to Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, p. 145.

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Posted in Books, Economics, General Foolishness, History, Trade, Uncategorized

Dad Jokes in Economics

Posted on May 13, 2018 | Comments Off

Even trade economists are not immune to making the occasional awful pun.

“Poland’s exports of golf carts to the United States were challenged on anti-dumping grounds… the Poles did not even play golf, so there were no domestic prices to work with: the Poles had put the cart before the course.”

-Jagdish Bhagwati, Protectionism (1988), p.51.

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Posted in Books, Economics, General Foolishness, Trade, Uncategorized