All of Robert Terrin's Comments + Replies
To add on to what John Buridan already correctly shared about major changes to the tax code in the early 20th century you might want to check out the Federalist Paper No. 30-36: https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers
Hamilton and the Federalists were arguing for taxation and a central bank to deal with the Revolutionary War debts that the U.S. had racked up (foreign loans and veteran backpay and pensions). Since direct taxes were declared illegal in the constitution, most of the money raised by the Federal Government was in the form of tariffs: https://ww... (read more)
I agree with your conclusion, Maxwell, and this piece was a joy to read. Jason's comment also seems correct to me in that subdomains very clearly exhibit the phenomenon of ideas getting harder locally. Still, the fallacy of composition tells us to be wary of summing up these subdomains. Diversification across subdomains may the answer to how the innovation frontier can continue to expand despite ideas getting locally more challenging.
I'm curious to hear what you think is the scarce resource. After trying my hand at starting a company and working in venture... (read more)
Thanks for sharing the "the unreasonable effectiveness of insurance" books and pieces about fire safety. This is also a theme that fascinates me, and while I was working in reinsurance modeling for cybersecurity I became fascinated with the history of steam boilers. This technological innovation is a great case study for progress that creates problems that requires more progress to solve.
The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company (now a part of MunichRe) was created to address this problem and the blog post below describes why the sin... (read more)
What a helpful and comprehensive guide to the economic study of human capital and productivity. Thank you for writing this! I like the idea of a model as a good way of testing various hypotheses. Models are undefeated for inferring causality. As a matter of prediction or even for generating hypotheses, I'm less optimistic about models.
Pulling on the institutional thread does seem like the right move, as opposed to ideas. They do at least roughly map to the slow pre-enlightenment, fast modernity and slowing post-modern pattern of progress. Still, privilegin... (read more)