Is the Man in the Arena stupid? (after reading two essays)

A senior manager at work recommended The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo Cipolla (economic historian at Berkley). Anyone familiar with a certain type of office already knows the punchline: the higher the position, the more likely the book is misconstrued as an instruction manual. Cipolla's essay is amusing and there is some benefit …

After Reading Nothing But The Truth

The Toronto School Board rejected a girl's book club event, including a speaking engagement, for Marie Henein's memoir due to a case she was the defence lawyer for in 2016. That case, along with all of the other high profile cases Henein has been involved in do not appear in the memoir, though her concern …

Untimely meditations on a mania

Gamestop's market capitalization (share price multiplied by number of shares, a measure of valuation for the company) exceeded $22 billion by the end of this week, up from the quarter of a billion it was valued at the same time last year. This $22 billion valuation is greater than the market capitalization of Kellogg's, the …

Store Wars: Imperfect views of imperfect markets

Economics has something of an edge when it comes to respectability among the social sciences, but it is often squandered by talking heads acting like everyone else is an idiot on TV. The benefit of taking an introductory economics class is not prestige or a set of talking points but rather a set of tools …

The Networks of Cultist Simulator

Cultist Simulator reveals its world through fragments and its lore is discovered by considering these fragments in relation to each other. The game's Discord server has an active community that discusses the lore of the world (now known as the Secret Histories), and there is plenty of room for interpretation about what is going on. …

Epic’s Tactics Are The System Working As Intended

The most perplexing feature of the commentary surrounding the Epic Games Store (EGS) is that the loudest voices assign criticism to Epic that is more appropriately targeted at Valve. The criticism that has gotten the most attention is the one that says Epic is using its timed exclusives in order to take over digital distribution, …

On “Where do you get your ideas from?”

If you would ever like to divest yourself of hero worship for creative types, look at their responses to the question "Where do you get your ideas from?" This cure is a little stale now as somewhere along the way somebody must have realized how insufferable they sounded and there are now thoughtful answers to …

Charity Streams

Part two of the loot box article is still forthcoming, but life happens and so I have a reason to write a different post in the meantime. Starting today (December 11th), I will be doing a series of casts every weekday for the next two weeks, each with a new (surprise and generally crowd pleasing) game. …

Advice

Given that this blog is still connected to my Twitch channel which seems to anchor all my other online encounters, I wanted to talk a little bit about advice. Specifically, I wanted to talk about the kind of advice you get on the internet, and how generally careless we seem to be about who we ask …

What’s in a Name: The Case of ‘Metrics

While it is hard to think of an econometrics book being popular in any traditional sense of the term, the best candidate for a popular econometrics textbook is Josh Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke's Mostly Harmless Econometrics (MHE). The title is a deliberate reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and communicates the irreverent tone taken in …