Publications, January

Welcome to the next decade! Exciting, isn't it?

There are some minor changes here too. From now on, I'll post some of my work on Medium –particularly work that didn't fit anywhere else or re-edited tweetstorms. I begin, timely enough, with reviewing my best and most important pieces during 2019.

In terms of quantity, this Medium addition helped - and made it fairly easy to hit the November record of 11.

Next month, my recent attempts of branching out should be paying off. We'll see!

Medium

• [1] 'My Year In Writing', there's something beautiful with kicking off a new decade, on a new platform, with a review of the achievements of the past year. Yes, sirs and madams, that's what we're doing.  
• Nobody knows why this was re-published by "Crypto New Media".
• [2] 'Dan Carlin on the Doomsdays of the Past', my take on Dan Carlin's book The End is Always Near, released in the fall of 2019. This was originally written as a tweetstorm. 
• [3] 'Bitcoin's Financial Returns (Full Calculations)', a supplement to my AIER piece on bitcoin's returns during the 2010s (see below). 
• Predictably, this made some waves in the crypto-community: Alex Dovbnya wrote about it, which AE daily swiftly echoed. 
• [4] 'If You've Never Missed a Flight...', a re-hashing of the popular post I wrote at Life of an Econ Student in 2016: using expected utility theory to decide how long in advance one should arrive at the airport. Conclusion? It depends on your a) risk-aversion, b) opportunity cost, c) stuff to do at airport. 

Notes On Liberty: (see all my posts here)

• [5] 'A Lesson in Inventing Your Own Statistics', a typically snarky Joakim-esque piece about economist Daniel Lacalle and his recent attempt at making shit up. No thanks. Contrary to common belief, you can't prove whatever you want with statistics. I mean, you can invent numbers and pretend they're real, but that doesn't really do much, does it? 
• Claire Jones at Financial Times' Alphaville site appreciated the piece enough to put it in that week's Further Reading - magnificently titled "SIWOTI: Riksbank Edition."

American Institute for Economic Research (all my pieces here)

• [6] 'The Hobbit Teaches That We Can't Eat Money', inspired by some holiday LOTR and Hobbit-watching, here's a serious point – and silly mistake – that humans, dwarfs and elves alike make in the last Hobbit movie. When your productive capacity is destroyed, say, after a dragon decimates your village, why would you ever turn to a treasure trove of gold coin for your salvation? Surely, you need to rebuild your societies – as in rebuild your lost capital, make new houses or shelter and quickly get some food. Since we can't eat gold, the treasures of Erebor does nothing for the humans who survived Smaug's attack. Being pretty isolated in the middle of a vast and mountainous area means you couldn't even get real goods from cities or other civilizations far away; your people would die before the goods acquired by gold would reach you. 
• Re-published on RealClearMarkets.
• [7] 'Was Bitcoin the Best-Performing Asset of the Decade?', where I investigated this peculiar 9,000,000% return-argument that seem to be popping up left and right. Perhaps bitcoin was the best-performing asset of the 2010s, but that's statistically trivial as it started from a very, very low base and – more crucially – the suggested prices at the beginning of the decade of $0.07 dollars etc, were not exactly readily available for anybody to buy. That is, there was almost no way anybody could have accessed bitcoin at those prices (in stark contrast to other high-performing assets like Netflix's or Amazon's or Monster's stock, which were publicly listed and tradeable for all). 
• Re-published at Capitalism Investor.
• Re-published by Crusoe Research, a Bolivian wealth management and consulting firm. 
• Commented on by Alex Dovbnya at U.today and again at AE daily
• [8] 'When Perfect Correlations Dissolve Into Dust', where I use some examples from Tyler Vigen's wonderful site 'Spurious Correlations' before illustrating that even the much-hyped yield curve is probably just another such correlations where some numbers happened to align. 
• Re-published at RealClearMarkets. 
• [9] 'Should We All Be Flying Less?', a mildly misleading title as I wasn't really assessing that question, but rather telling a story that illustrates the hidden order or airline industry: flying useful, efficient and beneficial routes (reasonable opinion) sometimes require airlines to fly inefficient and less-beneficial routes (seemingly unreasonable opinion) for the simple reason that they need to move the planes in the opposite direction. And some Taleb-esque redundancy stuff. 
• Re-published at CapitalismMagazine which, as always, has the best titles: "The Purpose of Flying a Nearly Empty Plane."
• Discussed by "Patria Finance" on the Czech site Kurzy.cz – according to Wikipedia, the largest czech finance site. 
• In turn echoed on Metebox.
• [10] 'The Economics of Price and Quantity Signals', a comparison between the price signals that economists often use to illustrate markets' impressive ability to convey information - and the quantity of goods and services demanded and sold, as this similarly acts as a signal for entrepreneurs to follow. 

Mises Institute (see all my writing here)

• [11] 'Investors, Randomness and Entrepreneurial Thinking', basically Jim Simons meets Nassim Taleb with an Austrian twist. In essence, I compare my review of Zuckerman's book on Simons with some of the randomness literature inspired and personified by Taleb. My editor's summary is perfect: "It's possible for investors and entrepreneurs to make a lot of money in markets without understanding the economic theory behind their actions."
• Translated to Portuguese by Wallace Nascimento and published on his Medium page ("Investidores, Aleatoriedade e o Pensamento Empreendedor")
• Re-published at Austrian Economics Blog.