Author Archives: Timothy B Lee

Yet another fantastic post from Clay Shirky about the decline of old media: About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites … Continue reading →

The New York Times has an article on how digital cameras and the Internet are transforming the photography business. The striking thing about the article is that it focuses almost entirely on the losers—incumbent professional photographers who are seeing increased … Continue reading →

A great bottom-up conversation between Reihan Salam and Chris Hayes: The key parts: Reihan Salam:That’s what I find most vivid and exciting, and it’s also what I find most important, because it also involves going beyond the nation state. It … Continue reading →

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry makes a strong case against the startup visa: Investors already have too much power in the investor-entrepreneur relationship. If this act is passed, fundraising won’t just affect an entrepreneur’s company, but his or her life. You have to … Continue reading →

Arnold Kling has posted his list of influential books. The first one is The Best and the Brightest, the book I’ve been blogging about the last few weeks: My take-away from that book might be described as “The Exclusive Country … Continue reading →

Matt and Will are tough acts to follow, but here is my list of books that have most influenced me, in roughly chronological order: Free to Choose: My father had this on his bookshelf, and it’s the first serious book … Continue reading →

Reader Bob Hawkins left a really excellent comment that I’m going to quote in full: There’s also the fact that the civilian departments don’t take their war responsibilities seriously. The military ends up doing jobs that are theoretically the responsibility … Continue reading →

To effectively oversee a massive, complex institution like the US military, you need a massive, hierarchical institution composed of people whose job it is to understand that institution. The military itself has an officer’s corps that performs this function. No … Continue reading →

In the last few posts in my Vietnam series, I argued that American foreign policy was crippled by the fact that senior officials were fed a steady stream of misinformation. Positive news about the war flowed easily up the chain … Continue reading →

Cord Blomquist did a good post over at TLF about the USTR/open source software issue. It set off a lively debate in the comments that, I think, reflected a common misconception about what free software is and why it’s valuable. … Continue reading →