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Complexity
Is there such a thing as irreducible complexity? Our current society is some orders of magnitude more complex than a hunter-gatherer society. What I mean is that the basic requirements of life: food, water, shelter; are provided by organized systems which require the labor of thousands of people and which no single person fully understands.…
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Home Bailout
The root cause of the troubles in the financial system is the severe decline in housing prices. Financial companies bet that this would not happen. So how about, instead of bailing out the financial companies by buying their bad mortgages, we bail out the homeowners by buying their houses? The government would buy houses for…
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Testing Schools
Parents want to be able to tell which elementary and high schools will be better for their children. Society wants to be able to reward good teachers and move bad ones into different roles. I don’t know how we should do that effectively, but I do know that what we’re doing now is a bad…
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Big Bail Out
How is the big bail out supposed to work? The basic idea seems to be that the U.S. government will pay bad financial assets. Once these have been purchased, financial companies will know how much money they have. Right now, nobody will lend money, because they don’t know how much they should keep in reserve.…
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Imperfect Storm
I’m sure I am not the only person annoyed by the overuse of the phrase “perfect storm”. The phrase first appeared with the book and movie of that name, referring to a real storm in 1991. I lived in Massachusetts at the time, and it was indeed a notable storm for me, as a very…