Armored knights vanished when gunpowder weapons made them ineffective, and cavalry vanished when motorized transport and tanks arrived on the battlefield. I believe infantry will likely be the next category of warriors to disappear. History shows that survival, cost-effectiveness, and competitive advantage dictate military force composition—not tradition. The lessons are clear: when a combat role…
trillions of dollars that appear to be economic growth are just borrowing from the future — a debt that will eventually have to be repaid with taxes or inflation. Both will kill growth. Consumers are in the same boat. Families have depleted their savings and gone deeply into debt to meet today’s stratospheric cost of…
0:37 Intro. [Recording date: July 23, 2025.] Russ Roberts: Today is July 23rd, 2025, and my guest is author, podcaster, life-hacker extraordinaire, Tim Ferriss. His podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, has over 1 billion–with a B, billion–downloads since he began in 2014. His books, which include The Four-Hour Workweek, Tribe of Mentors, and Tools of…
The New Jersey and Virginia 2025 gubernatorial elections provide a preview of the 2026 mid-term elections. Virginia looks set to elect its first female governor, with both major parties having nominated a woman. Unfortunately for the GOP, their candidate Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, is an anemic fundraiser and isn’t getting much support from her party….
Here’re the July PPI and CPI for coffee. Figure 1: PPI for roasted coffee, n.s.a. (blue), and CPI for coffee, s.a. (tan), all in logs 2025M01=0. Source: BLS via FRED, and author’s calculations. Note that near month futures for coffee are roughly the same in July as in January. This suggests that to a first…
Question: Suppose the demand for fentanyl is perfectly inelastic, and that the users of fentanyl steal from others to acquire the money to pay for it. In an effort to crack down on fentanyl use, the government imposes harsher penalties on suppliers of fentanyl, reducing its supply. How will this policy affect the amount of…
Fans Say Costco’s New Sparkling Protein Drink Is “Revolutionary” Delish And just like that, the CEO of Genius Gourmet, the maker of the “revolutionary” sparkling protein water just deleted his LinkedIn. 👀🫠 https://t.co/1q6jRLxz3l pic.twitter.com/uEIcEytZEl — James Li (@5149jamesli) August 17, 2025 Astronomers discover an ‘interstellar tunnel’ that connects our solar system to other stars Earth.com…
Timothy Taylor, at Conversable Economist, had a post on August 13 titled “What Economic Ideas are True and Nontrivial?” He starts with a famous story that Paul Samuelson told and I’ll quote it here: [O]ur subject puts its best foot forward when it speaks out on international trade. This was brought home to me years…
Greetings gentle readers, welcome to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today I have a neo-noir crime drama for you, more Mitchum goodness: The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Reviews: Ebert says: The movie is as simple as that. It’s not a high-strung gangster film, it doesn’t have a lot of overt excitement in it,…
With the outsized jump in the PPI, the natural question to ask is whether this implies a jump in the CPI. The evidence is mixed in terms of the aggregate PPI and the aggregate CPI, as noted in this post. More recent analyses suggest the PPI contains predictive power. Clark (1995) provides a skeptical view…