When I graduated from college I had a firm opinion. I felt I had to move to either Boston on San Francisco. This was based a book I’d read. Jane Jacob’s book about the economic basin that surrounds a city. Here is a nice lecture she gave in 1983 about the topic. The gist [...]
Here’s another power-law. Apparently the distribution for the interval between epileptic seizures is a power-law. The long intervals are rare. There are lots processes that give rise to a power law distribution. The proposed model in this case involves a cascading failure in the network of neurons. I don’t think this next paper has undergone peer [...]
The US is no longer the land of opportunity. If you want that, move to the Nordic countries. The vertical axis on this chart is a measure of how likely you are to have an income that differs from that of your parents. The horizontal line is the usual measure of income inequality. So if [...]
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Over the years i’ve spent a lot of time thinking, reading, etc. about economic inequality. This talk (ted) is amazing, and in a sense it comes down to this chart, which answers a key question: what is income inequality correlated with? So we now know that income inequality has high social costs, or to say it [...]
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
This may be the only thing I’ve ever read that made me actually want to work at Google. First off, ignore the stupid framing and scroll down to the actual content. Let me pick some quotes. Writing about Amazon: “Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways [...]
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
This topic came up today, and since I have a large collection of charts like this I thought I’d add this one. This is the log-log graph of the top 50 banks based their assets. The vertical axis is dollars; i.e. there are four banks with over a 1e12 or a Trillion dollars in assets.
A useful chart: Income is never distributed uniformly. What matters is how severe that becomes. Since what the top 10% want from their tax payments is fundamentally different from what the other 90% want this leads directly to class warfare. Denying that isn’t insane. The top 10% don’t need the government to provide: health, [...]
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Match making is at the heart of most middleman functions. The buyer and seller work thru the middleman to improve the chance of closing a transactions. Both sides reveal information to the match maker who then puzzles out if a deal can be closed. The negotiation literature is full of examples where the negotiations fail, [...]
Thursday, January 14, 2010
We know how skewed the distribution of wealth and income are. But I suspect that if you had data about the flux of advertising dollars you would discover that those dollars are targeted disproportionately at tail of the distribution. I gather that it is well known that if you look at the ads in a [...]
This is very good: How Complex Systems Fail (pdf) – hat tip to John Allspaw via his blog. I particularly like the swipe at root cause analysis. This is a nice complement to the wonderful book Normal Accidents, which I mention here. Update: via @gully this cartoon is great too, I’ve added one frame [...]
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