Byrne Hobart

Plus more globalization, a job ad, a reverse job ad, and more...

Plus: Introverts, Malthus, the economics of love, book reviews—and an upcoming book!

Plus: Charter Cities, technical debt, Euro conspiracies, and how hedge fund LPs asked for fee increases before they asked for lower fees

Plus the economics of not living up to your reputation, and a regulatory arbitrage unicorn, and more...

If your interests are niche enough, it feels like the world’s population is, at most, a couple hundred people. Enough that you don’t personally know everyone, but not so many that you’re more than two degrees of separation away. This thought occurred to me a few months

The Latest It’s been a busy week. The latest posts: * In Basis Risk, Alpha Factories, and Being too Clever for your own Good, I take a look at the perks and perils of hedge funds that lever up to run lots of ostensibly-uncorrelated strategies. It usually works, but everyone

Readers, I appreciate you all, but you are so negative. I’ve published 64 pieces on Medium, but 75% of my lifetime pageviews come from just three: one about why US residential real estate is broken, one about the challenges of the mealkit industry, and one about how California has

You can’t reduce all economic decisions to a series of financial bets, but it’s a good way to clarify things. Sometimes. Unfortunately, in the case of COBOL, a sufficiently thoughtful analysis points in two equal and opposite directions: we either need to pay people to learn it or

Everyone knows you can justify writing about any trend as long as you have three examples. So I was absolutely thrilled to see this tweet: The time has come. Join me as I overthink elevators. Elevators are a big deal because interruptions are a big deal. There is almost no

The most committed atheists I know are people who grew up religious. The most devout people I know went through a Strong Atheism phase. There are various theories here, most of which are folk psychology — disgust, attention-seeking, daddy issues, etc. — but the best one I’ve heard (from an evangelical

In Peak California, I argued that California was no longer the best place in the world for startups, but that the state’s economic ecosystem and tax ecosystem rely on a steady flow of new companies. I got some feedback. In this post, I’ll address some of the questions

Nassim Taleb has worked hard to popularize the concept of “skin in the game,” both through his books (like, well, Skin in the Game), and by calling people who don’t have sufficient skin in the game imbeciles on Twitter. The idea is straightforward: if someone makes a prediction, it