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Cash Crops and Cannabis
This is cool: On this point, here is an old post: “Uruguay and the Legalisation of Pot“. Happy Thursday. Rolling Alpha posts about finance, economics, and sometimes stuff that is only quite loosely related. Follow me on Twitter @RollingAlpha, or like my page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/rollingalpha. Or both.
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P.O.W. Economics: A Parable
Some time ago, I wrote a post about the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-operative: The Wisdom of Babysitters. And I wrote about it for two reasons: It’s interesting; and Economists like Paul Krugman used it as an analogy to justify quantitative easing. To summarise: Some Capitol Hill families were part of a baby-sitting co-operative. Baby-sitting hours were […]
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Donald Trump: Did He Beat The Market?
The story is, back in 1974, Donald Trump inherited a business empire “worth an estimated $40 million to $200 million”. That came from this source. No idea if it’s accurate, but let’s assume that it is. And then there are all kinds of calculations out there trying to establish how well Donald did relative to […]
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China’s One Child Policy. And Ageing Populations.
Earlier this week, the Chinese government announced that it was doing away with the one-child policy. Here’s a picture of how the decades of population control are expected to play out: In basic math: 2 parents + 1 child = 1 adult child supporting 2 elderly parents Add in some multiplication: (2 parents + 1 child)*(reproductive […]
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The Rise of the City-States
In prepping for some of the posts over the last week or so, I came across this map of South Africa, showing the average taxable income level by province: Looking at this kind of thing, you notice just how much Gauteng (read: “Johannesburg”) contributes to the fiscus. And then I found this, after which the […]
read moreThe Dog-Eat-Dog World
Capitalism might well be a cruel dog-eat-dog world. But unfortunately, so are all the other worlds. You know how you have those cartoon cow illustrations of different types of economies? In the dog-eat-dog analogy: Free Market Capitalism: is where the big dogs rear the small dogs they’ll eat, and the small dogs have to trust that the big dogs are […]
read moreCompanies: Why They Don’t Pay Employees More
What a weekend. The blog was read by more people over the last three days than in the whole of both 2012 and 2013 combined. One minute, you think you’re quietly sharing some thoughts with the 300 or so regular readers, who have most of the context for what you write and think – and […]
read moreA Visual Guide to the Federal Reserve
I’m sharing an infographic from Mint.com. Because I thought it was cool. But also because the story starts with “the turbulent banking industry” at the end of the 19th century, and the American farmers “who thought that the big Eastern banks were starving them of credit“. So, like, you know the Wizard of Oz? As […]
read moreHas Wits really made a mistake? #TuitionFees
In the early hours of this morning, an opinion piece appeared on Moneyweb: Wits has made a mistake: short-term win but long-term loss. This morning, the Wits protests against tuition hikes spread to Rhodes University in Grahamstown, and the University of Cape Town (although that particular protest does seem a little half-hearted). More universities to follow, no […]
read moreThe Wealth of the World in 2015
I spent this morning reading through Credit Suisse’s “Global Wealth Report 2015“. It was released earlier this week, and you know I love graphs. The highlights: In good news, it seems that over the last 15 years, the real rising stars were (some of) the emerging markets, and the big Scandinavian welfare states: Happy Friday. […]
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