I’ve been a long time reader of the blog “Messy Matters” (which invokes terrible images now that I am potty training a toddler). The authors, Sharad Goel and Daniel Reeves are academics who work in the Microeconomics and Social Systems (get it, MESS?!?) lab funded by Yahoo!. (What does Strunk and [...]
There’s an interesting article in the WSJ this week about poultry farmers who grow for Pilgrim’s Pride (PPC). PPC is in bankruptcy and have canceled grower contracts with 400+ poultry growers. In poultry farming the farmers own the chicken houses and provide the labor but the poultry company (Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson, Perdue, etc) own the [...]
Let me start by saying that I like Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Benoît Mandelbrot quite a lot. I don’t agree with them all the time, but that is generally true of people I like. I recall reading Mandelbrot’s book The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence some years ago and being struck [...]