Research

• Reasons for and against applying a surcharge to bulk e-mail
• If everyone tried to live in extreme sustainable communities, it would hurt the environment
• Making the Internet More Efficient for Business Users
• A proposal for replacing the gas tax
• Saran Wrap® and Victory Gardens: The Economics of World Foodstocks
• Why boycotting oil companies won't solve high gas prices
• How big prizes could solve our energy problems without higher taxes

• Rethinking the Aid Curve -- why direct aid isn't enough
• Grading GDP Growth
• Does the US Manufacture Anything Anymore? Yes.
• The good and bad consequences of debt forgiveness
• Comparing stages of economic growth
• Why the United States should look to Latin America as a strategic and economic partner
• For those who favor Western (American)-style economic growth and political freedoms, there is an urgent need to make the case for growth
• The economic big picture, explaining that this really is the best economy we've ever had
• Measuring returns on government investment
• How improving access to advanced degrees could improve economic development
• The lifesaving properties of economic growth

• Improving the understanding of supply and demand to include human nature
• Five big economic threats to the United States
• The State of Market Thinking in 2005
• Understanding the human cost of business failures
• Pride in one's work
• Why it's foolish work to regulate tastes and preferences
• How anti-capitalists fundamentally misunderstand creative destruction and how free markets are really the best elixir for the world's ills

• Why we need to stop using the word "safe"
• How freeing the slaves of the Confederacy through a buyout could have been much less expensive than waging war
• How economics can prevent disasters
• An alternative solution to terrorism that moves beyond the broken top-down model
• When to negotiate with terrorists and kidnappers
• Why virtuous politicians usually have to be irrational

• How the "War on Terror" is killing the Voice of America, and why that's a profoundly bad move
• Why pseudoscience isn't just fun and games -- it's a social ill with real costs
• Why ranchers and Wall Street brokers don't respect each other: Skill sets come from different stages
• Why people should consider offering inducement prizes instead of (or in addition to) giving money away in their wills
• Social Security and pension programs: What to do about compulsory old-age savings
• On the rationality of donating money to humanitarian-relief efforts
• If it is in fact a worthwhile policy goal, here is how to control big business. Especially since people will usually try to do so even if it's a bad idea.
• How a rational analysis of the threat posed by terrorism suggests we should be more concerned about other problems that actively take more lives
• The public decision-maker's checklist

• Why big cities aren't always better places to live
• Evaluating the good and bad results of city-county consolidation and mergers
• What's wrong with modern economic development incentives and packages, and how to do the job right
• Using demolition bonds to prevent urban decay
• The economics of municipal utilities

• The 100-year business plan: Rarely used, but highly useful
• The 2008 economic-stimulus package, by the numbers
• Comparative ages of the largest companies in the US, UK, EU, Japan, Australia, and Canada
• South Korea's Managed Economy
• An overview of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, prepared for a class in business law.
• An econometric study of the Toronto Stock Exchange
• Three lessons to unlearn from Donald Trump
• A history of great company names
• Notes from the 2012 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' meeting

• Economic attitudes of the 2008 Presidential candidates
• Proposal for my senior thesis under the Presidential Scholar program at the University of Northern Iowa
• A text listing of sites on Brazilian economics
• Could Iowa's budget problem be solved with staff reductions?

• Is musicianship a depleting asset? (in progress)
• Newspapers of the world by printed size
• Screen dimensions of handheld Internet devices
• Why people shouldn't use "click here" as link text
• What else could have been done to get the word out about the South Asian tsunami disaster of 2004
• Finding the right amount of nationalism
• Why talk radio will always contain more opinion than research
• Links to broadcasting history sites
• Links to trends in communications
• A paper that answers the question: What Would Francis Bacon Say About South Park?
• A directory of commercial aviation sites and magazines
• Causes of media bias
• A summary of situations illustrating that you're always on the record in the Internet era
• Observations on good and bad campaign logos
• Priorities for institutional websites

• The Hurricane Katrina diaspora
• Lessons to be learned from Hurricane Katrina
• Methods of Mass Evacuation
• Using cost-benefit analysis to combat the myth of "sparing no expense"
• Evacuation by automobile
• Business continuity in a disaster

• Incentives for renewable energy in Iowa

• Art Deco furniture
• Business cards

• Examples of when government is in the wrong, offering counter-examples to the old saw, "If you aren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about"
• Open-source programs used to build this site
• The history of the Bell System
• A group paper on the subjects of Internet chat rooms, MUDs, and instant-messaging programs
• "Web of Control", a brief guide to HTML first delivered at a student leadership seminar
• A report on the Navajo Code-Talkers of World War II
• Links to science and technology news
• Is our military readiness slipping?
• A defense of a natural right: Objectivism and Free Speech (based on a case study for a class in communications ethics)
• The Aryabhatiya, one of the foundations of Indian mathematics (by William Gongol)
• Consumer goods
• Consolidation and Efficiencies in the Radio Industry (Brian Gongol's senior thesis in industrial organization at UNI) - public presentation