Author Archives: Timothy B Lee

Twenty years ago today, the first East Berliners poured across the wall that had imprisoned them for 28 years. Matt Yglesias points to a great Fred Kaplan story on the origins of the wall. Because West Berlin was located deep … Continue reading →

This from Jonah Goldberg has to be the best description of election post-mortems I’ve read: This happens after every election. The partisans and pundits race for the election results like kids charging the disgorged contents of a piñata, claiming convenient … Continue reading →

I’ve argued before that a lot of top-down thinking is driven by a tendency to anthropomorphize complex systems or processes. If a system is hard to understand in its full complexity, people deal with it by thinking about it as … Continue reading →

My first few posts were devoted to the proposition that bottom-up systems work better than people think. I argued that people systematically underestimate bottom-up systems like evolution, wikipedia, free software, the blogosphere, and the market process. Obviously, the other side … Continue reading →

Pseudonymous blogger (and software developer) “Cog” shares my distaste for software patents: One thing that I find extremely frustrating about many legal scholars and economists’ approach to patents it that they make two false assumptions. The first assumption is that … Continue reading →

One of the perennial tropes of the network neutrality debate has been the tendency of the pro-regulation side to paint it as a David-and-Goliath struggle between big, evil corporations and the little guy. Way back in 2006, James Gattuso pointed … Continue reading →

My wife is a first year medical resident, so I read this article by my friend Kevin O’Reilly with interest. Until I started dating a med student, I didn’t realize how absurdly overworked medical residents (recently-graduated doctors going through mandatory … Continue reading →

Thanks to Slashdot, my last post generated a ton of discussion. My favorite comment comes my friend and erstwhile co-blogger Cord Blomquist. I think it’s worth quoting the bulk of it: I think the reason that most of the folks … Continue reading →

Kerry’s article about thick liberalism has generated a ton of intersting discussion. Here’s Ilya Somin, Kerry, and Ilya again. Here’s Will. I still think Kerry and Will are right and Kerry’s critics are wrong, and I won’t re-hash the various … Continue reading →

James Lakely, a research fellow at the Heartland Institute, recently pointed me to a new study he’s written on the network neutrality debate. (See also his op-ed summarizing the argument.) Lakely is clearly a smart guy, and his paper is … Continue reading →