Gongol.com Archives: February 2017
February 15, 2017
Why aren't there more good popularizers for economics?
What's with the shortage of public intellectuals, anyway? The shortage of good "explainers" on behalf of economics is a real loss to society. So much about conflict (of all types) traces back to resources and their creation, destruction, and distribution -- and that's economics. One causal factor, perhaps, is that the answers to economic questions tend toward ambiguities, gray areas, and conditionals. That makes it very hard for anyone credible to gain traction in the public eye.
Beware the perils of "factory fetishism"
Romanticizing a particular sector of the economy without thinking through the consequences of development is a path to waste, inefficiency, and trouble.
A Russian spy ship is hanging out just off the coast of Connecticut
30 miles out from a submarine base
Singapore marks 75 years since the Japanese occupation
The story of Singapore is a complicated one, to be sure, but it is a definitive case study in the power of market economics, trade, and endogenous initiative ("bootstrapping", in a sense) to take a place with no substantial advantage in natural resource wealth and convert it into a tremendously wealthy place.
What can and should happen when a person's birth family isn't ready or willing to give a child the care each one deserves.
