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December 09, 2015

3 Modern Economic Lessons from an Ancient Tax on Windows

King William III of England needed money, so in 1696 he decided to implement a new property tax. To make sure the tax was progressive (i.e., affected the rich more than the poor), the parliament devised a seemingly clever idea: they’d use the number of windows as an index for the value of a house. Continue Reading...
December 08, 2015

Facebook and the Institutional Forms of Social Good

Over at Think Christian, I take a look at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and derive a lesson from Jesus’ interaction with the rich young man in Mark 10. A basic lesson we can take from the decision to organize the initiative as an LLC rather than a traditional non-profit corporation is that pursuing social good is possible in a wide variety of institutional forms. Continue Reading...
December 07, 2015

More Fear Mongering on GMO Foods

In an email last week, GMOInside.org – a coalition opposed to genetically engineered and genetically modified organisms, which counts shareholder activist group As You Sow a member – blasted an email chock-a-block with material for two previous posts (here and here). Continue Reading...
December 04, 2015

The Power of Prayer

This is just a brief note, a cohortative: Let us pray! For those tempted to disdain prayer in favor of work in alleviating the ills of the world, I recommend C.S. Continue Reading...