John T. Fishback

I'm working on a project that requires hiring some programers. And doing so has reminded me how much I liked writing code during the one semester in college I did so. So I'm going to try to fit in learning to code again.

Inspirations:

Cory Doctorow, in Little Brother:
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.fb2

I wrote my masters thesis on the term moral hazard. The term is a fascinating case study in the way economic thinking and economic language have come to dominate our common discourse. William Safire did a fairly good On Language column in 1998, and given the recent attention and frequent use of the term, did so again last Sunday. The 1998 version was significantly better.

The New York Times has been looking at executive pay across this first part of 2007. In a recent article, Eduardo Porter wrote on the phenomenon of the increasing gap between the pay of top executives and other executives. The gist is that the gap between those who are paid at the very top of the scale and those who are just very very well paid is growing faster than the gap between those at the top and bottom of the pay scale.
Porter quotes Northwestern’s Robert Gordon as saying “there’s a sense that executive pay is not determined by supply and demand.”

It’s a pretentious name for a post, I know. Sorry - it’s not that I think I know something you don’t. Where I’m coming from here is that we’re supposed to be living in an information age - the best research on any number of subjects is only a few clicks away. But most of us (including, too often, me) settle for faking our way through our jobs and our lives. We can do better. Let’s all try a little bit harder to do the (easy) work necessary to make better decisions.