With Lynne Kiesling

One of the few things that has made this particular bleak midwinter bearable has been the sudden rise of the viral game Wordle. For those who have not yet been initiated, Wordle offers a single puzzle each day. The goal is to guess a 5 letter word. You have only 6 guesses to get it right. After each guess, color coded squares indicate which letters are in the secret word and in the right place, which are in the word but in the wrong place, and which are not in the word at all. It’s a charming little game, made all the more fun by the restraint it imposes (Only six guesses! Only one puzzle per day!) and by the ease with which one’s success–but not the solution–can be shared on social media.

The game has spawned imitators of all sorts: an

It’s shopping season, which means it’s time to pick on capitalism. 
The latest meme for doing that is to create a collage of very similar products and tag it with the comment “Capitalism breeds innovation.” And the latest version of that meme, illustrated here, uses the Hallmark Christmas movie genre as its illustrative example.
It’s a good joke. (Though I’m a bigger fan of the prose version that goes: What has 15 actors, four settings, two writers, and one plot? 632 Hallmark movies.) And there is something both creepy and funny about all those smiling, shiny, green and red clad couples posed affectionately on the movie posters. 
But it’s a pretty bad criticism of capitalism’s ability to inspire innovation.
These Hallmark movies all look alike, it’s true. And they

Amazon Prime’s new 4 part documentary on MLM giant LuLaRoe is a must-see for anyone interested in questions about American entrepreneurship, the history of women in entrepreneurship, and–sadly–entrepreneurship that goes wrong.
Founded in 2012 by DeAnne Brady and her husband Mark Stidham, LuLaRoe used a network of independent distributors using “social retail” to sell their whimsically patterned skirts, dresses, and leggings, in at home parties reminiscent of the Tupperware parties of the 50s and 60s. Distributors spent between five and ten thousand dollars for a stock of clothing items, which they then marketed on their own. By 2017, the company had more than 80,000 distributors. 
The company’s origin story is magical, particularly for those of us with a strong

If you’re enjoying this week’s EconTalk episode with Scott Newstok, you might be ready to jump in and read more about Shakespeare. There is an almost unlimited supply of books on Shakespeare. It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the onslaught of critical literature, popular treatments, retellings, revisionings, and performances. It’s glorious.
It also makes creating a list of five recommended books about Shakespeare an almost impossible task. Do we recommend the classic works? The newest? The most popular? The most fun? Do we focus on the writer or the writing? How do we find a way into the grand edifice we have made of the poet, the playwright, the glove-maker’s son? 
I’ve decided to suggest 5 books (and a few extra) that I think provide a variety of useful and

A Review of The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, by Virginia Postrel, Basic Books, 2020

In 1998, Virginia Postrel closed her now classic book The Future and its Enemies with the observation that “We live in an enchanted world, a world suffused with intelligence, a world of our making. In such plenitude, too, lies an adventurous future.” Though I suppose some might see her books written since then–The Substance of Style and The Power of Glamour—as somehow “artsy” and disconnected from the more traditional political and economic arguments of The Future and its Enemies, they seem to me to be deeper explorations into that enchanted world and the intelligence that suffuses it.

Postrel’s newest book, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made

Eula Biss’s new book Having and Being Had is a poetic meditation on wealth and capitalism.

Biss is a poet, and the book’s short essays/meditations/prose poems are filled with truly beautiful moments of writing. But what makes Biss’s book an intriguing read is not just her way with language. Biss’s poetic approach to her subject matter means she is willing–maybe even required–to turn her topics over and over again. This leads to discussions like that in “Consumers” which is an exploration of the meanings of the word “consumption.” While I take issue with Biss’s assertion that the word originally meant “a wasting illness” and later came to mean economic consumption (the word has been used in both ways since the early middle ages) I did very much enjoy her

A useful postscript to my reading of Bad Blood and my blog posts about the podcast The Dropout, both of which examined the Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos story, is Tyler Shultz’s new Audible podcast, Thicker Than Water. 

Shultz is, of course, the grandson of George Shultz and the whistleblower who began the process of exposing the lies and misrepresentations behind Holmes and Theranos.

In much the same way that my most pressing question about Holmes and her company was “How could anyone do this?” my most pressing question about Tyler Shultz when I encountered him in Carreyrou’s book and The Dropout was, “How did he do this?” Among the many people who knew, should have known, or seem to have known how badly Theranos’s technology was failing and how boldly Holmes was

Part 3 of a #ReadWithMe Series
Read the earlier posts here and here.

By 2016, Holmes and Balwani had broken up, and he was leaving the company. Carreyrou’s series of articles about Theranos’s unreliable technology had been published in the Wall Street Journal. And yet, many of Elizabeth’s early investors, like Tim Draper, still defended her unreservedly as someone who is “doing a great thing for humanity” and “changing healthcare as we know it.” Channing Robertson, her early supporter at Stanford, also remained a strong supporter, though the podcast notes that there may be pecuniary reasons for that, as Robertson was paid about $500,000 annually by Theranos.

In June, 2016, the deal with Walgreens fell apart and Walgreens sued for $140 million. The suit was

A #ReadWithMe series. Read Part 1.

As Theranos’s profile as a company, and Elizabeth Holmes’s profile as a startup star, began to rise, Holmes began a publicity push unlike anything seen before.

She worked with Errol Morris, director of The Thin Blue Line, on a set of promotional videos that focused on patients’ fears about blood tests, and Theranos’s promise to provide a better patient care experience. Holmes appeared at Glamour’s Women of the Year awards. Forbes 30 under 30. She was interviewed on CNN and CBS This Morning. She was on the covers of Forbes, Inc., Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. She even got a feature in the Style section of the New York Times.

By 2014, Theranos was valued at almost 10 billion dollars. Holmes personally was worth 4.5

John Carreyrou’s book about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is so comprehensive, it’s hard to imagine what a podcast covering the same material could add. (You can read my first post on Carreyrou’s book here.) But the first thing we hear in the first episode of the ABC News podcast, The Dropout, is an audio clip from Holmes’s deposition. 

And that means we hear Elizabeth Holmes’s voice.

Holmes’s voice is a consistent theme in Carreyrou’s book, significant enough to have its own entry in the index. In public interviews and in her deposition, Holmes’s voice is a startlingly deep baritone. Carreyrou, and others who have worked and spoken with her, say that this is a pretense. Holmes’s natural speaking voice is more traditionally feminine and

Innovation requires big dreams. Changing the world isn’t for the faint of heart, the unadventurous, or those who aren’t willing to take chances. But those big dreams have to be backed up by hard work, integrity, and endless research and analysis. John Carreyrou’s book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup looks at a startup founder and company who may have had the first, but who certainly lacked all the rest.

I still remember the first time I heard about Elizabeth Holmes’s company Theranos. It was this new medical tech company that was going to revolutionize lab tests for blood. Instead of painful  blood draws from veins, Theranos had technology that was going to allow hundreds of lab tests to be run from the drop of blood drawn from a single

Review of First Cow (2020), Dir. Kelly Reichardt, starring John Magaro and Orion Lee

First Cow is a quiet movie. Set mostly in the woods and a small trading post in the Oregon territory, and focusing almost exclusively on two characters, it is also a small movie. There’s no epic sweep here, of story or of scenery.
But the tiny details of First Cow come together to tell a story about entrepreneurship and ambition that Econlog readers will be thinking about for a long time afterward.

One way we might think about First Cow is as an interrogation and exploration of the chestnut (somewhat accurately attributed to Balzac) that “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.”

Our heroes, Otis “Cookie” Figowitz and King-Lu meet while trekking the Oregon woods.

A little while ago, I mentioned on Econlog that I have a history of fascination with economic thinking as expressed in non economic works–and particularly with the economic thinking of people who are in the daily grit of working blue collar jobs and doing household work. I think their diaries and letters and interviews and books of advice tell us at least as much about the economic circumstances under which they were written as do articles by economists–probably more. 

If you’re looking for this kind of material, you can’t go wrong by haunting used bookstores and poking through their collections of advice books, home economics texts, and collections of tattered old magazines. Economics is everywhere, and while an increasing amount of attention has been paid to

Gina Miller Johnson warns of the Danger of Benevolent Paternalism. Concerned by the increase in calls from her students and from the population as a whole for “The government to do something” almost regardless of what the “something” might be, Miller Johnson observes that this rapidly leads to government overreach. 
In a crisis like a pandemic, these dangers are heightened. “Whatever one’s view of the proper role of government as it relates to public health, another question must be posed: when, if ever, does public health provision as a public good supersede the protection of civil liberties as a fundamental role of the state? The initial wake of the pandemic saw disturbing support for sacrificing civil liberties in the name of public health.’

Michael L. Davis

I suppose there are people who might be surprised to find themselves getting solid economic analysis from a food blogger. I am not one of them. I’ve actually been waiting for this moment since March.

Deb Perelman is one of my favorite food bloggers. Her blog, Smitten Kitchen, details her adventures cooking for her growing family in an impossibly tiny kitchen in New York City. She has a great reputation for funny writing, great photos, and reliable and delicious recipes. (I am NOT kidding about the coffee cake.)

But last week, she did something a little different. In the business section of today’s New York Times, Perelman has a great piece titled, “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both.” The article is a testament from a

Sarah Skwire and Steve Horwitz
Here’s what we do every July 4th. First we grill some kind of meat, and then we eat pie. Then we sit on the back porch, and we wait for it to get dark. When we have decided that it’s dark enough, we gather up the kids, the bug spray, and a big beach blanket, and we drive a few subdivisions over to a spot just across from the summer home of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. There, we join a small group of neighbors and plant ourselves outside the gates of the concert shell, where we can listen to Sousa marches and the 1812 Overture and wait for the fireworks to begin.

And some people say there’s no such thing as a true public good.

The classic economic definition of a public good is a good that is non-rivalrous and

Steve Horwitz and I have been teaching an online class about economics and literature, pairing core economic concepts with literary works that demonstrate those concepts. This past week, we talked with the students about opportunity cost (see Steve’s thoughts on Buchanan’s Cost and Choice here), using Thomas Grey’s “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes” and T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as our literary texts.
Using poetry, I told the students, helps us think about opportunity costs in ways that travel alongside, but are not the same, as the ways that economists think about them. For economists, the important thing is that a choice is made. In the most reductive version of this, the moment of choice, the moment where

A three-part #ReadWithMe series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

I was brought up to believe that we shouldn’t put too much weight on the kinds of cars people drive, the clothes that they wear, and the houses that they own. It is the character of the person that matters, not the external trappings.

This means that for a long time, there was a moment at the end of Pride and Prejudice that was very difficult for me. It comes just a few pages from the end of the novel, in chapter 17 of the third volume. All difficulties have been resolved. Wickham has been forced to marry Lydia, and they’ve been shipped off to Newcastle. Mr. Bingley and Jane are blissfully engaged. And Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth have, at last, found their way to love through the tangle of mistaken impressions

A three part #ReadWithMe series. Read Part 1 here. 

Last week, I wrote about the ways in which Austen surprises us with her plot developments, urges us to reconsider and re-examine our initial assessments of characters and situations, and reminds us how very bad we all are at this project of trying to judge other people. The second volume of the novel continues this theme, with the shocking revelations of Mr. Darcy’s letter at the end of the volume causing an almost complete reversal in the reader’s (and Elizabeth’s) understanding of his character and actions.

Austen’s initial title for Pride and Prejudice was, after all, First Impressions.The game of the novel is to warn us, over and over, that our initial assessments are unreliable and will be overturned,

A Three-Part #ReadWithMe Series
After the recent EconTalk episode with Janine Barchas, we promised we’d discuss this book… So here goes!

(Although this post focuses on Volume One of Pride and Prejudice it will contain spoilers for the rest of the novel. Given the near-infinite number of adaptations of Austen’s novel, I’m assuming you’re all likely to be familiar with the book’s major plot points, even if you haven’t read the novel before.)

Like many of us, I was first introduced to Jane Austen when I was a teenager, reading Pride and Prejudice for a school assignment. On first read, and with the characters and major events of Pride and Prejudice less ingrained in the culture than in our current, Austen-enriched days, I was completely hornswoggled. The rude Mr.

One of the wisest things ever said about poetry was said by the Canadian poet Tom Wayman in his poem “What Good Poems are For.” Wayman describes a man who is so moved by a poem “about work he did, what he knew about,/ written by somebody like himself” that he takes it from table to table in a dive bar, reading it to every customer. Wayman tells us that this is because the man realized that the poet’s words were “a person is speaking/ in a world full of people talking.”

Our world is full of people talking lately. Here are some people speaking–sometimes across the centuries. To me, the awareness that others have felt the many things I have felt lately and have struggled with the many things that challenge me these days makes me feel less alone, even while socially

Last week, my kids made fun of me for having plenty of TP in the house, and made fun of other shoppers for buying lots of TP. I suggested to them that, with more people at home, we’d probably go through a lot more TP and other essentials, and that with store supplies uncertain, they should learn to understand why I, and other shoppers, might be particularly concerned about the rising demand for this essential household item.

So I had them count the stock of TP in our bathrooms. We had 16 rolls, or 4 rolls for every member of the house.

We recounted today, and we have 12 rolls, so we have used a mathematically tidy one roll per person in a week. That suggests to us that, if nothing changes, we should be stocked for another 3 weeks, and should start thinking about

As the COVID19 pandemic hit the US, with school and office closures rapidly following its arrival, Americans began to stock up for the long haul. Unsurprisingly the stocking up led to some shortages. Stores rapidly ran out of hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies, and any number of perishable goods. But the item we heard about most often, and most derisively, was toilet paper.

Who were these crazy people stocking up on toilet paper? The mockery was everywhere. The Atlantic brought out a story comparing the current COVID19 TP buyers with people in 1973 who stockpiled TP in response to a joke Johnny Carson made on his show. The higher demand for TP is characterized everywhere as an overreaction and a moronic response to misinformation. The mockery has gotten so bad that

On Plagues and Pandemics

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
When the bubonic plague hit the 14th century, it hit hard. In 5 years, it killed an estimated 25 million. By the time it swept away, the world would never be the same. New political, commercial, and social arrangements changed everything. Kelly’s sweeping narrative history is readable and thorough, and gives you the big picture, with enough small detail to enliven and humanize this story of almost unimaginable tragedy.

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe  AND the plague sections from the Diary of Samuel Pepys
Daniel Defoe was only a child when the Great Plague hit London in 1665, so his famed Journal of the Plague

I’ve just read Berakhot, the first tractate of Talmud–the collection of rabbinic teachings from the first through sixth or seventh centuries C.E. And while the Talmud is known for its complex legal debates and the many lively tales interspersed among them, I have also enjoyed discovering the economic thinking it contains.

The first tractate of Talmud contains, for example, reminders to sell stock when demand is high. “When the horn is sounded in Rome, signifying that there is demand for figs in the Roman market, son of a fig-seller, sell your father’s figs, even without his permission, so as not to miss the opportunity.” (Berakhot 62a) * A discussion of when to say the blessing over a good fragrance leads to a digression on marketing–and possibly even positive

It is never a bad idea to remind students of economics that, long before Smith’s Wealth of Nations gave birth to modern economics, complex and vivid discussion of economics were already happening. They have been happening, I am certain, for as long as humans have trucked, bartered, and exchanged. Two excellent reminders of the length and complexity of the human interest in economic matters are the summary of Stoic ethics by Aurius Didymus, from the first century BCE, and Cicero’s De Officiis (44 BCE).

Most striking in the Didymus text is that his continued interest in the Stoic definition of the virtuous man gives particular attention to the economic aspects of the virtuous man. At the end of an extended litany of the qualities of the virtuous man, Didymus

Russ Robert’s interview with Janine Barchas opens so many avenues that I want to pursue for thought and discussion that I’m as dizzy as an Austen heroine’s younger sister at her first ball. The question of why Austen is still so firmly in the canon, what other Victorian novelists have been unjustly neglected, the popularity of modern Hollywood/BBC/Bollywood versions of Austen novels–each one merits a blog post of its own.

But I was particularly intrigued by Barchas’s discovery and analysis of cheap editions of Austen’s work. I’ve argued in a range of other articles for FEE, Cato Unbound, and Reason, that if we want to find evidence of the positive representations of the bourgeois virtues in literature, we need to read books intended for the bourgeois–not aimed

As a knitter, I was fascinated by the discussion of recycled sweaters and recycled yarn in last week’s Econtalk. Russ Roberts and Adam Minter have a brief exchange about how to recycle wool sweaters. Russ posits that, “It’s easy. You just take an end and just start pulling until you get a really long piece of yarn, and you’re done. You get a new piece of yarn. Adam explains that in industrial recycling “What they do is, they take these sweaters and other wool garments, it’s not just sweaters, but wool in general, and it’s essentially chopped up. They have these big machines that rip these garments apart into their individual fibers and then re-roll them into a fabric called ‘shoddy’.”

Crafters do a lot of recycling of yarn, and we do it in ways that replicate

[This post contains spoilers for the final episode of the 2020 Netflix series, Dracula. Proceed with caution.]

The current rendition of Dracula on Netflix, created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, was providing me with a delightfully gory evening of blood and horror when it stopped me dead. Out of nowhere, Count Dracula himself delivered one of the finest descriptions of the miracle of modern progress since Adam Smith marvelled that the greatest monarch of his time was not as far removed from the peasantry in terms of wealth than the peasant was from the monarch of an undeveloped country.

Adam Smith was able to make progress visible by comparing the rapidly industrializing England and Scotland with countries that had not yet experienced the rapid increase in

Elizabeth Freke is widely acknowledged to have been the crankiest woman in England in the 17th century. The editor of her diary, Raymond Anselment, justly describes her life as one of “medicine, money, and misery.”

I think economists would find her fascinating.

Freke’s misery begins when she marries a dissolute cousin without her father’s knowledge or support. She would be the first to agree with that assessment, heading up her journal with a note indicating that it is “Some few remembrances of my misfortuns [that] have attended me in my unhappy life since I were marryed.” 

These misfortunes are primarily economic, and Freke’s diary provides us with a grim picture of the economic life of women when coverture was still the law of the land. Coverture was the