Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

December 11, 2025

One Economy to Rule Them All

AFTER ALL, THEY REFLATE:

Are bubbles good, actually? (Tim Harford, 11th December, 2025)

There is a solid theory behind the idea that investment manias are good for society as a whole: it is that without a mania, nothing gets done for fear that the best ideas will be copied.

Entrepreneurs and inventors who do take a risk will soon find other entrepreneurs and inventors competing with them, and most of the benefits will go not to any of these entrepreneurs, but to their customers.

(The dynamic has the delightful name of the “alchemist’s fallacy”. If someone figures out how to turn lead into gold, pretty soon everyone will know how to turn lead into gold, and how much will gold be worth then?)

The economist and Nobel laureate William Nordhaus once tried to estimate what slice of the value of new ideas went to the corporations who owned them, and how much went to everyone else (mostly consumers). He concluded that the answer — in the US, between 1948 and 2001 — was 3.7 per cent to the innovating companies, and 96.3 per cent to everyone else. Put another way, the spillover benefits were 26 times larger than the private profits.

Latin America

THE CRYING ENDS:

Two Years of Milei: The Reform Agenda Moves Forward in Argentina (Marcos Falcone, 12/10/25, Cato at Liberrty)

As of September, the economy is growing at 5 percent on a yearly basis. Poverty, which exceeded 40 percent before Milei took office and peaked at 52.9 percent in the first half of 2024, is now down to 31.6 percent. Monthly inflation, which often surpassed 10 percent in the pre-Milei era and reached 25 percent in December 2023, now hovers around 2 percent. Both exports and imports are rising rapidly.

Technology

SCROLLING IS READING:

If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?: The internet is training us to expect optimized experiences (Jay Caspian Kang, Dec 10, 2025, The New Yorker)

I have felt the panic myself, and so, this past July, with a book deadline looming, I got off of social media. The break started with X, which was my biggest problem, but, by the end of August or so, Instagram, TikTok, and pretty much anything that allowed me to argue with strangers had been deleted from my phone. Before this, I was spending roughly ten hours a day looking at my phone or sitting at my desktop computer. I didn’t need that number to come down, but, when I checked my weekly status report, I wanted all the brightly colored little bars that track the number of hours I’d spent on time-wasting apps to be relocated to the word-processing app that I use to write my books.

The plan worked, more or less. I finished a draft of the book on time. But the other imagined effects of a social-media detox never quite materialized, at least not in a noticeable way. I was especially hoping that I would start reading more books, because I have found that enviable prose prompts me to try to write my own, not necessarily out of a sense of inspiration but rather out of fear that if I don’t hurry up and start typing, I’ll fall behind. And yet, the chief effect, I found, was that I simply didn’t know what was happening in the world. That was nice enough, but all those books I had hoped to read never found their way into my hands.

You Missed

Energy

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Republican Liberty

IT IS THE UNIVERSALISM INHERENT IN LIBERTY…:

Energy

ECONOMICS TRUMPS IDEOLOGY:

Homocentric Universe

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.