As it has been explained to me, the point of "Game" is for smart, nerdy "beta males" to use their brainpower to study and master techniques for persuading attractive girls in bars that they are "alpha males" at work. Of course, the young lady eventually figures out that you are actually a beta male ...

While reading up on Ameriquest, the top subprime mortgage originator in America before going belly-up in 2007, I was struck by this bit from a 2005 LA Times article by Mike Hudson and E. Scott Reckard: Many of the ex-employees likened Ameriquest's culture to the rough-and-tumble world of "Boiler Roo...

A couple of years after I wrote about Qian and Lichter's study here, Annie Gowen reports today in the Washington Post, "More Young Adults Are Seeking Partners of Same Ethnicity:" But scholars delving into the U.S. Census have found a surprising converse trend. Although interracial marriages overall ...

An almost-forgotten incident in American economic history was the pyramid scheme that swept Southern California during the stagflation of May 1980. Yet, now that we know that about 2/3rds of the Housing Bubble of 2000-2007 took place just in California, it's worth reviewing incidents from California...

One of the more lurid and instructive events in recent economic history was the wave of gigantic pyramid schemes that plunged newly de-Communized Albania into chaos in 1997. Even before Enver Hoxha's xenophobic Communist dictatorship took power at the end of WWII, Albania was the back of the beyond....

Michael Lewis visits Iceland for ten days for Vanity Fair to develop A General Theory of the Icelandic Financial Crash. The subtext of his article is that Lewis, who wrote a bestselling memoir in 1989 about his few years on Wall Street, is suddenly so much in demand again as a financial journalist t...

An excerpt from my review in The American Conservative of the Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay winning film "Milk:" “Milk� is a repetitious biopic about the 1970s political career of the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro Street,� following Harvey Milk as he grinds through five election...

Here's a valuable new study that answers some questions I've brought up: Foreclosures in States and Metropolitan Areas: Patterns, Forecasts, and Pricing Toxic Assets William H. Lucy and Jeff HerlitzDepartment of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture, University of Virginia Nationa...

The Southern Poverty Law Center has worked tirelessly to eradicate the last vestiges of poverty, Southern or otherwise, in the lifestyle of founder Morris Dees (a member of the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame) by smearing people like Dick Lamm, three-times Democratic governor of Colorado. ...

It's ironic that Obama gets elected with big plans to soak the rich at the very moment that the rich are suddenly much less soakable, but it's not really a random fluke. After all, if the markets hadn't collapsed, the margin would have been much closer, and Obama might even have lost. In theory, it ...