Will Rinehart

From a paper on the 1926 Radio Act: Jane Gaines argues that law is always a performance of ideological assumptions; therefore, the question is not IF the Radio Act was ideological, but what was its ideology.

Alissa Cooper, formerly at CDT and now at Cisco, wrote her PhD dissertation on network neutrality practices in the US and the UK.

When Jefferson said “The earth belongs to the living,” he was railing against the popular Burkean revision of Locke’s contractual society.

A back and forth has popped up about the Top 40.

Earlier this week I heard Walter Isaacson delve into his new book, “The Innovators,” at the American Enterprise Institute.

In reaction to what NYPD’s Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch calls a “hostile anti-police environment in the city,” officers are simply refusing to arrest or ticket people for minor offenses, leading to an overall arrest dropoff of nearly…

Samuel Wilson’s prodigious and interesting output at Euvoluntary Exchange lead me to two articles by Michael Munger, the source of the blog’s name and focus.

The reason for all this has to do, primarily, with timescales.

I have begun in earnest to read through Annalee Saxenian’s “Regional Advantage,” charting the computer industry’s genesis in both Silicon Valley and along Boston’s Route 128.

I was reading over the comments my former colleagues at the International Center for Law and Economics and TechFreedom filed on Title II reclassification to find these two paragraphs of pure Alchian bliss: With most current pricing models, consumers have…

Famously, Stewart Brand noted that “information wants to be free.”

The WSJ quotes a section of Richard Wagner ’s “Economic Policy in a Liberal Democracy” (1996): Suppose medical care is financed through state budgets, or, equivalently, through private insurance that is constrained by government to charge common pricing.

David Frum has an intriguing post in The Atlantic dealing with the Bill Maher / UC Berkeley fiasco.

I have been trying to educate myself on digital goods, digital trade, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Ebola spreads because of a lack of organized health institutions.

Pain might actually have a pro-social function: “Our findings show that pain is a particularly powerful ingredient in producing bonding and cooperation between those who share painful experiences,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Brock Ba…

Svetlana Boym has a fascinating article on nostalgia.

This week I heard the phrase that haunts tech policy.

Alex Parrish begins “Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion” by recalling a story about one reaction to his book, and in doing so, helps to explain the problem of the technological/cultural determinism debate: When I first began…

David Autor just released a new paper exploring the intellectual development and paradoxes in machine displacement of labor.

My former colleague Jon Henke has reviewed “The People’s Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age” for Reason.

As you might recall, the Stanford Prison Experiment pitted several student against each other as randomly chosen prison guards or prisoners.

Tom Chatfield’s essay on technology and language groks Walter Ong and under-appreciated Medium theory.

An ever-present theme in the commentary of modern technology is its isolating effect.

Recent estimates suggest the US might meet the Kyoto Protocol because of natural gas substitution.

Scalability problems plague the creation of large web sites.

Poking around Cory Doctrow’s Tumblr site today, I came across a Neil Gaiman quote: For most of the human race, pretty much all of the lifespan of the human race, information was currency.

An essay at the Times Literary Supplement adds context to Frankenstein: As the editors note, Shelley’s contemporaries would have associated the monster’s terror with the Terror of the French Revolution.

“Fear is an extremely powerful motivating force, especially in public policy debates,” writes Adam Thierer.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

The best parts of this poem come from the end: Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is…

“Masters of the Universe” will be the next book in the pile, largely due to a review by Michael Clune: That neoliberalism won out was due neither to the failures of the welfare state nor to a “master plan” pushed by the agents of capital.

Have you forgotten what we were like then when we were still first rate and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth it’s no use worrying about Time but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves and turned some sharp corners the whole pasture looked like…

Over the last five years, the libertarian movement has expanded drastically.

A little known fact: Minimum-wage laws date to the 1930s, and supporters in Congress at the time were explicit about using them to stop blacks from displacing whites in the labor force by working for less money.

Contrary to the popular sentiment, companies do not maximize profits.

In 2008 I voted for Barack Obama.

When Apple rebranded itself under the second reign of Steve Jobs, one of the pillars of company was the production of tightly integrated products.

The difference between a tax, a fee and a penalty is based on the purpose of the revenue.

This was bound to happen: the proliferation of mobile devices is beginning to cause the “incidents” involving airline passengers to rack up.

Reuters is reporting on the history and legal problems of Amazon’s taxes.

From the World Future Society, here are methods to help predict and plan for the future: Systematically Scan the Media — Futurists often conduct ongoing and systematic surveys of news media and research institutes.

I don’t know why I have never considered it before, but Ross Kenyon is correct: Class analysis is the inverse of methodological individualism.

From Social Statics: Government being simply an agent employed in common by a number of individuals to secure to them certain advantages, the very nature of the connection implies that it is for each to say whether he will employ such an agent or not.

Innovative products are not necessarily followed by broad adoption.

I have been watching Mark Thoma’s History of Economic Thought class on YouTube for a refresher on the subject.

Last week I was chatting with a friend of mine at the Tax Foundation and he made a bold claim—I was a technocrat.

From this article: History teaches us that old media never die.

This version of assorted links is dedicated to big data: Advances in Large Scale Computing at Google Trying to Keep Relevant with Search Means Baking in Big Data for Google The Algorithm that Runs the Innovation Economy

From “Why Teaching Equality Hurts Men,” Because of everyone, straight, white men are the least likely people to experience exclusion and inequality first-hand during their youth, and are therefore the most likely to disbelieve its existence later in life.