Can the US build a DJI?
How DJI achieves its exceptional margins, from a teardown of two popular drones.
economics
The 12th-century military disaster that forever changed global finance
After a plague-ridden crusade left Venice drowning in debt, the republic created the world's first bond market, changing the relationship between the government and its citizens.
What Is Brittle Prosperity? The AI Boom and the Panic of 1873
Brittle prosperity is when strong economic data rests on a few booming sectors and never reaches most households. Why the AI economy fits the pattern.
The Game Theory of How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices | Quanta Magazine
Recent findings reveal that even simple pricing algorithms can make things more expensive.
The Firms That Power Prediction-Market Trades
Industry insiders explained during the FOS Asset Class event why market making is not the same as the “house” in traditional sports betting.
They bought homes at the peak of Austin's housing boom. Now they're taking devastating losses.
Homeowners who bought at the peak of Austin's real estate frenzy are eating huge losses or crossing their fingers for a comeback.
Food Prices Today: US Produce Price Charts from USDA Data
Food prices today for onions, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, avocados and strawberries: USDA wholesale and shipping point quotes with price charts, change against a year earlier, grocery ad prices by region and daily updates. Latest report 18 Sep 2026.
The Hierarchy of Money
Terraform Industries
Sunlight into methane for fracking prices
The Variety Trap
Why Margins Collapse Where Product Variety Explodes, And How Assembly Can Win Them Back
In much of the West, the importance of these close relationships was lost, with competitive bidding and more transactional relationships becoming the norm.
In this model, vertical integration is not about owning everything. It is about owning the layers of the stack where outsourcing would slow learning, limit final integration or affect product performance.
The vacant building everyone complains about is cheaper to keep empty.
Have you talked about why?
The Permission Gap: Why Data Doesn't Fix Coordination
The permission gap is the distance between the part of a system that sees a local problem and the part allowed to fix it. More data does nothing to close it.
In the industry, waiting for a town to grow is called land banking.
That land isn’t waiting for a decision to build. It’s waiting for a decision about what kind of store to build.
China massively overbuilt high-speed rail, says leading economic geographer
Lu Dadao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences warns that oversized, underused HSR infrastructure has ignored basic economic logic, weakened public finances, and derailed regional planning.
Does your college football roster cost $8M or $50M? Here's our report on 68 teams
The best teams are, on average, the ones paying players the most, but there's a wide disparity between the schools at the top and the bottom of major conferences.
Ranked: Central Bank Assets as a Share of GDP by Country
See which countries have the largest central bank assets relative to GDP, led by Hong Kong at 130%.
Note: I'll pull up the article for you. Here's a summary of **Ranked: Central Bank Assets as a Share of GDP by Country**: ### Main takeaway Central bank balance sheets grew sharply after the 2008 financial crisis as authorities responded to successive economic shocks. This piece ranks 20 major economies and financial centers by central bank assets as a share of GDP, using the latest Q1/Q2 2026 data…
How France Keeps its Small Shops
Commercial lease law, rent indexing and planning rules explain the retail mix other countries are losing
Will farm animals always suffer? - Works in Progress Magazine
A Pricing Model That Defies Logic, Confuses Economists, and Can Really Work
“Pay-what-you-want” isn’t just for museums and churches.
Field Guide to What Gold Is Actually Doing Part I
Two tribes dominate every conversation about gold, and both lose money reliably.
Why Smart People Stay Broke: The Hidden Game Theory Rule Nobody Teaches You
An economist watched people pay $40 for a $1 bill. Here's why smart people always lose.
The Egg That Cannot Be Priced
America's biggest egg company can't set the price of a single egg, which is the whole story, in both directions.
Eggs.org is the home of the Egg Clearinghouse,
It is a clearing mechanism for the slack in the system, and it is tiny.
What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x — CatalystNeuro
A given level of LLM intelligence costs about a thirtieth of what it did a year ago, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Using Artificial Analysis's measured cost per task, this post traces the falling price of each capability level, explains why cheaper intelligence leads…
A great deal of useful work does not require the smartest model available, but a model that is good enough, applied many thousands of times
At today’s prices a full pass over the corpus costs a little over a hundred dollars with a model whose capability was at the frontier in the spring. At the prices of this past March, the same pass with the same level of capability would have cost several thousand dollars, and a year ago that…
View: Big tech meets Milton Friedman
Big Tech is working its way through all four stages of a money-spending matrix legendary economist Milton Friedman outlined.
Milton Friedman, the legendary economist, laid out a simple matrix. Spend your own money on yourself and you’re disciplined on cost (it’s your money) and clear on value (you know what you want.). That’s an efficient economy, though not a very vibrant one. Spend your own money on someone else and…
big tech companies are spending other people’s money on other people.
Cheaper nuclear new builds
Technetium Dreams
All that glitters is not gold: The most valuable things in the world!
Something Is Changing in the Unit Economics of Software
Why AI is compressing software margins, and what that does to the SaaS playbook
The Great Chinese Oil Mystery
America’s greatest rival is single-handedly averting a global energy crisis. No one knows how the country is doing it—or why.
Zillow just revised its home price forecast for over 400 housing markets—see the map - Fast Company
Zillow slightly upgrades its national home price outlook—predicting that over the next 12 months, U.S. home prices are likely to shift +0.0%.
The Myth of the Food Desert
Kelefa Sanneh reviews “Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement,” by Hanna Garth.
The Portland fire sale
Who owns downtown buildings? The answer has remarkable implications for our city's future
How Moats are Built
Building a moat is the difference between having fun with business, vs eating glass all day, every day, for years. This is how moats are actually built.
It’s also true that Power is much easier to identify than it is to build.
Bandag
What if removing carbon dioxide permanently from the atmosphere was really cheap?
Waking up to the crushing cost advantage phytoplankton carbon has
Why Anti-Corruption Strategies May Backfire - Nautilus
How power and transparency affect efforts to stamp out bribery.
Blue Dot Fever: What the Industry Isn't Saying Out Loud
The concert business has a trust problem. The economics are just where it shows up first.
How funerals keep Africa poor
Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead
Where Are the Economies of Scale in Homebuilding?
Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem.
Understanding the Federal Reserve Balance Sheet, Quantitative Easing, and Tightening
Manoj Singh wrote an article for Investopedia titled Understanding the Federal Reserve’s Balance Sheet (20 February 2026).
What's the Sticker Price of Exorbitant Privilege?
If you buy into this Pflueger/Yared perspective, then the price of exorbitant privilege is outspending your military adversaries. And the US has outspent other advanced economies by a large margin when you express defense spending as a fraction of GDP. I took its NATO partners…
The Protein Shortage Is Coming
Making all that whey is complicated.
We're in 1905: Why Electricity (Not Dot-Com) Is the Right AI Analogy
The Weekend Windup #29 - Cool reads, events, links, and more
The Invisible Landlord of Global Shipping
How Britain built a system where cargo-dependent nations pay rent forever. And why that system is finally cracking.
Are Prediction Markets Good for Anything?
We all know they’re casinos. It’s time to look at the data behind the froth.
The vast majority of these bets are not on questions that might produce useful information. Roughly 90% of Kalshi’s trading volume (dollars exchanging hands between bettors) is from sports betting, making Kalshi effectively a sports gambling website with a small prediction market attached. I find…
I’ve found that the benefits of prediction markets fall into five different categories.
Portland's Long Fall Toward Hitting Bottom
Two years ago, my wife went on her morning walk past the school across the street, when she saw the school’s custodian—dead on the sidewalk of what we later learned was a heart attack.
Opinion | The Unlikely Recovery of America’s China-Shocked Towns
The jobs are coming back, despite President Trump’s tariffs and harsh immigration enforcement.
The Trouble with Transformers
And the long slouch towards cyberpunk
Escaping the Ogallala trap
There is a closing window to stop Waymos from creating omnigridlock.
Why GPU Useful Life Is the Most Misunderstood Variable in AI Economics
Amazon shortened GPU depreciation while Meta extended it—same month, same technology. The $3.6B divergence exposes the accounting discretion behind AI infrastructure economics.
Who Is Paying for the 2025 U.S. Tariffs? - Liberty Street Economics
Over the course of 2025, the average tariff rate on U.S. imports increased from 2.6 to 13 percent. In this blog post, we ask how much of the tariffs were paid by the U.S., using import data through November 2025. We find that nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden…
Why American needs fewer bus stops
Removing them can turn a service people tolerate into one they’re happy to use.
How Did TVs Get So Cheap?
You’ve probably seen this famous graph that breaks out various categories of inflation, showing labor-intensive services getting more expensive during the 21st century and manufactured goods getting less expensive.