Because of preferential attachment, most social networks are profoundly inegalitarian.
The pairing instinct is the great remover of the limits between individuals,
The financial system is so genuinely complex and so many of the relationships within it are non-linear, even chaotic.
The Japanese experience, when a conscious effort by the central bank to prick an asset bubble ended up triggering an 80 per cent stock market sell-off and a decade of economic stagnation.
The Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), which was to cater to poor borrowers like military veterans, and a rechartered Fannie Mae, now a privately owned government sponsored enterpr...
The Dutch had improved on the Italian system of public debt (introducing, among other things, lottery loans which allowed people to gamble as they invested their savings in government debt). They had...
The Bank’s proper role in a crisis as the ‘lender of last resort’, to lend freely, albeit at a penalty rate, to combat liquidity crises.42
Super zip codes’, looks increasingly like a new caste, equipped with the wealth and power to override the effects of mean reversion in human reproduction, so that even their dimmer progeny inherit the...
Six degrees of the mathematician Paul Erdös, himself a pioneer of network theory, as we have seen.13 Recent research suggests the number is now closer to five than six, which suggests that technologic...
Reified
Parties – that nominate candidates for election. Just as important as the parties are the officials – civil servants, judges or ombudsmen – whose responsibility it is to ensure that the elections are...
Now Rothschild was providing Europe with a new social elite by raising up the system of government bonds to supreme power . . . [and] endowing money with the former privileges of land. To be sure, h...
More likely to have creative ideas (or less likely to suffer from group-think).
Investors tended to infer future changes in fiscal and monetary policy from political events, which were regularly reported in private correspondence, in newspapers and by telegraph agencies. Among th...
If Moore’s Law continues to hold, computers should be able to simulate the human brain by around 2030
However, the round trip was a very long one (fourteen months was in fact well below the average). It was also hazardous: of twenty-two ships that set sail in 1598, only a dozen returned safely. For th...
Hierarchies are just special kinds of network in which flows of information or resources are restricted to certain edges in order to maximize the centrality of the ruling node.
Cognate
Arguing that Google and Facebook should do the censoring is not just an abdication of responsibility; it is evidence of unusual naivety. As if these two companies were not already mighty enough, Europ...
An Empire-less Britain would be just a ‘cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herring and potatoes’.