Byrne Hobart

When people talk about the financial services industry and subsidies, they’re usually thinking of implicit subsidies the industry receives — you can cast the bankruptcy code, the tax treatment of interest, and even the existence of central banks as an implicit finance industry subsidy. But it’s a tricky topic:

American liberals and conservatives don’t differ in explicit beliefs all that much. In a non-parliamentary system, the two parties coalesce at just-visibly-left- and just-visibly-right-of center. There’s no need to go any further, and per Hotelling’s Law it’s a bad idea anyway. And yet on countless individual

The copywriter Eugene Schwartz was a master growth hacker. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure if a product was worth manufacturing — so he’d run ads for it and sell it anyway, and just cancel the orders if demand wasn’t there. Sometimes, it’s the marketing campaign that creates the

Campaign finance laws exist to provide transparency and prevent undue influence. It would be bad for a very rich person to write a giant check to a politician who, in return, passed laws that made that rich person richer. That’s especially risky because it’s a self-perpetuating cycle. If

Is there a speed limit for wealth creation? Two recent Twitter threads asked this question in two different ways, which is the sign of an interesting problem. In both cases, the question is: subject to an extreme constraint — time or headcount— how rich can you get? This is a salient