A Guessing Game: The Wisdom of Crowds for Small Samples
A county fair in England in the early 20th century held a contest to guess the weight of an ox. The person with the closest… Read More »A Guessing Game: The Wisdom of Crowds for Small Samples
February 2020
The Cult of Marginality Revisited
In my recent blog post Neoclassical Economics: The Cult of Marginality, I critiqued the use of marginalism in economics. My post received some good feedback,… Read More »The Cult of Marginality Revisited
Multiple Models Are Better
Did you ever had to solve a homework problem, and you used more than one way to solve it? As long as both methods yielded… Read More »Multiple Models Are Better
Neoclassical Economics: The Cult of Marginality
When I was in college there was a popular song called Cult of Personality . A couples of lines went: “I tell you one and… Read More »Neoclassical Economics: The Cult of Marginality
The Risk Management Imperative for Government Weapon Systems
In the 1960s film The Graduate the protagonist Benjamin Braddock is a recent college graduate who does not yet have a job. One of his… Read More »The Risk Management Imperative for Government Weapon Systems
The $10,000 Toilet Seat Cover, or Why Do Government Systems Cost So Much?
The high cost of government weapons and aerospace programs has been a problem for decades. The most outrageous examples often make headlines. In 1985, one… Read More »The $10,000 Toilet Seat Cover, or Why Do Government Systems Cost So Much?