In 1776, Adam Smith famously described the “very trifling manufacture” of a pin factory. By dividing the production of a single pin into eighteen distinct operations—one worker drawing the wire, another straightening it, a third cutting it—a small team could produce thousands of units daily. Smith noted that a lone, unspecialised worker could scarcely make…
Understanding Economic Viability in Structured Production Systems
The Core Insight: Two Types of Goods, Two Ways of Trading At the heart of our research lies a deceptively simple but profound observation about modern economies: not all goods are traded the same way. When you buy coffee at a café, you participate in a competitive market—the price reflects supply and demand from countless…
The Consultant: A magic realistic short story
This is a short story written by Claude AI about old things and human work that should not really get lost. This short story is written in the style of magic realism, influenced by Hubert Lampo’s “The Coming of Joachim Stiller”. The Consultant On the thirty-first of December, the Ministry of Productivity received a visitor…
The Weight of Tomorrow: How Debt Was Born
The transformation of human trust and obligation from sacred bond to invisible chain Written with Origin Story Book by Claude In the time before time had weight, when promises were as light as morning mist and disappeared with the same ease, there lived a people who knew only the present moment. The great rivers of…
New research paper on compromise values
I just posted a paper on so-called compromise values for cooperative games here on the game theory research page. The paper is written with my co-author Rene van den Brink, who is a professor of game theory at the VU University Amsterdam. This new paper, “Construction of Compromise Values for Cooperative Games,” delves into a…
Trump’s Tariff Madness
There once was a president named TrumpWho made global traders quite grumpHe’d gripe and smirk,“I’ll add a new TARIFF!”While economists’ hearts took a thump.