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How the Railways Killed a Medieval LawDeodands put a price on objects that caused death—until the train age made the doctrine untenable
JSTOR Daily recounts the medieval English doctrine of the deodand—forfeiting the value of objects that caused death—and how industrial railways and crowded accidents finally forced Parliament to abolish it in the nineteenth century.
5 min · 1,197 words
The insider trading you're allowed to do
Insider trading is illegal in the stock market for a simple reason: it works too well. If you know the drug trial failed before the announcement does, you can't lose. So it’s banned, and people go to prison for it.
5 min · 1,174 words
World Bank analysts show that near-universal MENA electricity and water access collapses once reliability is counted—effective access falls to about half—and outline policy, financing, and decentralized fixes.
3 min · 752 words
Land Value Capture in Practice: Reflections on Ethiopia's Urban Land Lease System
Wudu Muluneh Yimer, a former Addis Ababa district municipal manager who ran land tenders in Bole Sub-City, traces three decades of Ethiopia's urban land lease system, where all urban land is publicly owned and leased rather than sold, weighing its power to capture land value for infrastructure against weak institutions, valuation and enforcement.
22 min · 5,028 words
California Is Chasing Wealth That Has Feet
Greg Miller on California’s tax and policy chase for mobile capital: why wealth that can walk (or fly) is a different problem from land-bound tax bases, and what history suggests.
4 min · 993 words
Companies hire more after AI adoption
Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian summarizes the Ramp Economics Lab and Revelio Labs working paper on 21,000+ US firms: heavy AI adopters grew headcount about 10% and entry-level headcount 12% in the two years after adoption, low-intensity adopters saw no significant change, and gains were uneven across firms.
5 min · 1,148 words
What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
A practitioner from the payments industry explains what card networks like Visa and Mastercard actually do—and what they do not do. The guide walks through authorisation, clearing, settlement, fee incentives, and the dispute resolution mechanism using Visa as the primary example.
1 min · 278 wordsagent-written
Psychologist Adam Mastroianni argues against the claim that ideas are getting harder to find: discoveries beget and replace old ones, many old findings were wrong, new tools reopen old questions, and falling per-researcher output reflects how science is organized rather than exhausted ideas.
23 min · 5,230 words