Joakim Book
Research Fellow
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Should We All Be Flying Less?
I have long been a fan of the writer, statistician, and “flaneur” of financial markets Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His eye for the unseen and his heavy emphasis on sample selections and randomness in the world always struck a chord with my basically Misesian heart. That he’s ruthlessly unafraid of controversy and a remarkably clear writer…
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When Perfect Correlations Dissolve Into Dust
Statistical relations can be tenuous, and statistics can be fishy. Perhaps with time, Harvey’s yield curve relation will go the way of pedestrians and South Dakota lawyers — a near-perfect correlation dissolving into dust.
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Was Bitcoin the Best-Performing Asset of the Decade?
Bitcoin’s returns over the last decade have dominated every other asset we can compare it with, but that still doesn’t tell us what we need to know about the future viability of this extraordinary development in human monetary affairs.
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The Hobbit Teaches that We Can’t Eat Money
There are a lot of good economic lessons to be learned from popular culture. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as the subject matter of economics is ingrained in our very humanity and movies and the arts reflect aspects of human life. By chance alone, some of that creative work ought to carry with it some profound…
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More Good Arguments Against a Carbon Tax
Carbon taxes do alleviate some negative externalities that we might want to counter — but they come with a nasty drawback (and getting them in place requires an inefficient and opaque political process) that no caring person would want to impose on the poorest of us, namely that basic necessities become more expensive.
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•
Troubles with the Economists’ Case for a Carbon Tax
Carbon emissions are not, contrary to what many economists and non-economists seem to believe, approaching the idea of a pure externality; their costs are only partially external to the main transaction.
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•
What Is Money? It’s All About Liquidity
When I give my sister a nonfiction book for Christmas, neither of us presumes that she’ll use it in payments for food, rent, clothes, travel, or something else that she desires. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who’d accept a 300-odd-page chunk of paper adorned with the Penguin Press stamp in exchange for anything, so…
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Jim Simons and His Quants
We meet colorful characters, financial success, and business matches made in heaven — but also ceaseless struggling, heartbreaking losses, friendships, marriages, and partnerships with flourishing beginnings and abrupt endings.
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Technology Has Made Flexible Work Possible, and That’s Wonderful
When I got my first summer job, my coworkers and I were paid the same hourly wage. Doing sales and booking in three languages for a shipping company, we spent our days mostly managing fares and talking to calling customers over the phone (this job has since been all but automated by well-functioning e-commerce solutions,…
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An Unexpected Climate Hero: Equity Markets
The best way to protect vulnerable countries and communities from some of the inevitable impacts of climate change is to up their defenses – i.e., make them rich as quickly as possible.
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•
Should We All Be Flying Less?
I have long been a fan of the writer, statistician, and “flaneur” of financial markets Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His eye for the unseen and his heavy emphasis on sample selections and randomness in the world always struck a chord with my basically Misesian heart. That he’s ruthlessly unafraid of controversy and a remarkably clear writer…
-
•
When Perfect Correlations Dissolve Into Dust
Statistical relations can be tenuous, and statistics can be fishy. Perhaps with time, Harvey’s yield curve relation will go the way of pedestrians and South Dakota lawyers — a near-perfect correlation dissolving into dust.
-
•
Was Bitcoin the Best-Performing Asset of the Decade?
Bitcoin’s returns over the last decade have dominated every other asset we can compare it with, but that still doesn’t tell us what we need to know about the future viability of this extraordinary development in human monetary affairs.
-
•
The Hobbit Teaches that We Can’t Eat Money
There are a lot of good economic lessons to be learned from popular culture. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as the subject matter of economics is ingrained in our very humanity and movies and the arts reflect aspects of human life. By chance alone, some of that creative work ought to carry with it some profound…
-
•
More Good Arguments Against a Carbon Tax
Carbon taxes do alleviate some negative externalities that we might want to counter — but they come with a nasty drawback (and getting them in place requires an inefficient and opaque political process) that no caring person would want to impose on the poorest of us, namely that basic necessities become more expensive.
-
•
Troubles with the Economists’ Case for a Carbon Tax
Carbon emissions are not, contrary to what many economists and non-economists seem to believe, approaching the idea of a pure externality; their costs are only partially external to the main transaction.
-
•
What Is Money? It’s All About Liquidity
When I give my sister a nonfiction book for Christmas, neither of us presumes that she’ll use it in payments for food, rent, clothes, travel, or something else that she desires. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who’d accept a 300-odd-page chunk of paper adorned with the Penguin Press stamp in exchange for anything, so…
-
•
Jim Simons and His Quants
We meet colorful characters, financial success, and business matches made in heaven — but also ceaseless struggling, heartbreaking losses, friendships, marriages, and partnerships with flourishing beginnings and abrupt endings.
-
•
Technology Has Made Flexible Work Possible, and That’s Wonderful
When I got my first summer job, my coworkers and I were paid the same hourly wage. Doing sales and booking in three languages for a shipping company, we spent our days mostly managing fares and talking to calling customers over the phone (this job has since been all but automated by well-functioning e-commerce solutions,…
-
•
An Unexpected Climate Hero: Equity Markets
The best way to protect vulnerable countries and communities from some of the inevitable impacts of climate change is to up their defenses – i.e., make them rich as quickly as possible.