Johanna

In the current economic system, unemployment spreads like a virus: people lose their jobs, stop spending money, businesses are forced to shut down, and so on.A Job Guarantee could act as a buffer that absorbs unemployed people before they fall to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. And this could help to stabilize the economy during... See more

Take a problem, say analyzing a business’s profits (as in consulting). Break it down into logically exhaustive possibilities , e.g. “revenue” and “costs”. Break down each branch further into its component parts, e.g. revenue becomes price * quantity. Follow this process recursively, each time breaking the tree down into components.

Now you have a

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For hunter-gatherers, chiefs and shamans could, and did, moonlight as foragers and hunters. Overlapping duties preserved a strong sense of community, reinforced by customs and religions that obscured individual differences in strength, skill, and ambition. Shared labor meant shared values.But in industrial economies, lawyers don’t tag in for brain... See more

Most advocates propose UBI not because we have solved mankind’s big money problems and the next stepping stones clearly lead us to Star Trek. Rather, they advocate for UBI because they foresee even more problems if we do not try something new in the near future to stave off real pain.

What’s causing the productivity slowdown? The subject is controversial among economists, and many different answers have been proposed. Some have argued that it’s merely that existing productivity measures don’t do a good job measuring the impact of new technologies. Our argument here suggests a different explanation, that diminishing returns to... See more

You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both—you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot.

Whenever possible (and it’s almost always possible), have someone do a day or two of work with you before you hire her; you can do this at night or on the weekends.

The main problem Rosenzweig describes in the book is that attributes we tend to think cause great performance (culture, leadership, etc.) are often just things that are attributed to companies we already know are high-performing. There’s a Halo around everything they do. How many current high-fliers would ever be described as having a bad culture,... See more

These plans fail even though they cheat and give themselves dictatorial power. “End corporate welfare, then redirect the money to UBI!” But if it was that easy to end corporate welfare, wouldn’t people have done it already, for non-UBI related reasons? “We’ll get a UBI by ending corporate welfare” is an outrageous claim. And even the plans that let... See more