Joel E Lewis

The NYTimes has a must read article on the tea party movement.  For me there were three key takeaways:

The Tea Party movement is redefining and enlarging the radical right, which could have significant impact in the primaries.
People strongly believe ideas that to put it bluntly, I find completely nuts.
This movement is being led by the [...]

A great article about systemic instability, financial markets, and the the deficit.  Here is one taste:
The Obama administration tells us that the government deficit is going to be well over $1 trillion a year for at least ten years. And that does not take into account the outlier years in the 2020s when the really [...]

When was the last time our government went through a significant overhaul?  No, I don’t mean when was the last time the people switched but the game stayed the same.  I mean when was the last time the structure really changed?  The best examples that comes to mind would FDR’s terms (each one brought new [...]

The NY Times has a great article on the bleak future facing the US Postal Service, a topic I have tackled before.
While the US Postal Service (and the reporters covering it) focuses on doom and gloom and how mail is dead, the Swiss post service is adapting.  There are many companies, like Zumbox and Earth [...]

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Of course, if the basic economics of the industry never changed in the first place, why should we expect anything but more of the same.

The Straw That Breaks the Camels Back
Incremental change can cause a collapse that is difficult to reverse.
What is particularly intriguing is the way that the lakes change. They exhibit what is known as hysteresis. That means you can “drip feed” them with fertiliser without causing much visible change until, suddenly, the whole system crashes [...]

Auction technology has blossomed around the world, and called into existence a whole new industry, replete with firms, entrepreneurs, consultants, counter-consultants and even a few gunslingers. When the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Market Design Working Group held its first-ever meeting earlier this month, many of the stars were there, mostly economists, but a handful [...]

The Fat Tail
Ian Bremmer. Oxford University Press, USA 2009, Hardcover, 272 pages, $11.95

The Fat Tail’s central argument is that businesses rarely forecast and prepare for political risks as well as they do economic ones, which is a mistake because most political risks can be found in the “Fat Tail” of probability charts, where unlikely but high impact events [...]

In evolutionary biology, punctuated equilibrium is the theory that evolution takes place through extremely small changes over a species history (equilibrium) but that occasionally, extremely significant and localized jumps occur rapidly (say in the span of a few generations).  I think that this is a good model to explain cultural change over the course of [...]

Witness the birth of Google, the business giant:
Veach and Kamangar argued that all the ad slots should be auctioned off. In search, Google had already used scale, power, and clever algorithms to change the way people accessed information. By turning over its sales process entirely to an auction-based system, the company could similarly upend the [...]