Economy & Policy

Free labor, Peter Kropotkin, and Yochai Benkler

My latest Time column is now online (and on actual paper in the issue dated Feb. 26, with the little fetuses on the cover). It begins:

It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin’s big idea–that there are important human motivations beyond what he called “reckless

Building the first draft of Mumbai in northern Virginia

A reader (and old friend) comments on my hopeful post about the northern Virginia boom region that is Fairfax County:

I don’t really buy the assessment that Fairfax is another Paris in the making. I actually think there is something fundamentally different about the way sprawl works today and about the way places like Fairfax have

Meanwhile, in suburban Maryland …

A loyal reader in McLean sent me a link to this article by Alec MacGillis in last Thursday’s Washington Post. It begins:

To hear some activists and local officials in Virginia tell it, the key to slowing rampant growth is to follow the lead of many Maryland counties: Ban development where roads and schools are crowded.
But here is what

Building the first draft of Paris in northern Virginia

My conversation with Til Hazel took place, appropriately enough, in the parking lot of a brand new shopping center just off Highway 7 (the Harry Byrd Highway) in Loudoun County. I was there working on my column in this week’s Time about the staggering mass prosperity of Loudoun and neighboring Fairfax County, and while the column ended …

Northern Virginia’s vast, taxpayer-funded riches

My second Time column is now online. Here’s how it starts:

When the Census Bureau announced last August that northern Virginia’s Loudoun County had become the nation’s most affluent, with a median household income of $98,483, it was something of a shock to locals. Loudoun is far from exclusive: a third of its 255,000 residents arrived in

George Bush, deficit-fighter

Okay, here’s my big problem with the budget that the Bush administration submitted to Congress yesterday. (No, I didn’t read all of it, but I did check out a few highlights.) It makes a big deal about getting rid of the federal deficit by 2012. But guess what: George Bush will have been out of office for three years by then–and the …

Ed Thorp explains the new hedge fund reality

I had a nice e-mail conversation with Ed Thorp last week. Some of it was reproduced in my Time column, but I thought the world’s legions of Thorp fans might want more.

For those who don’t know the man, he’s a math professor (he spent most of his career at UC Irvine), who figured out in the early 1960s how to beat the house at blackjack …

Hedge funds on paper

My first Curious Capitalist column, “Hedge Funds Head for Mediocrity,” is in the edition of Time that hits newsstands tomorrow. It’s also online right now, but I must say it looks much prettier on paper (worth every one of those 495 pennies). Here’s how it starts:

In 1962, a government study of mutual funds revealed that they were, on

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