Steve Jobs, the founder and former CEO of Apple, died this morning. He has rightly been described as a visionary and genius. Apple is one of the world's largest and most profitable corporations thanks to Steve Jobs. This raises a whole bunch of questions of interest to economists. First, are public companies which are run by their founders more successful than those run by professional managers? Second, how do public companies address succession issues whenever a founder CEO steps down? Third, how can an economy encourage innovation and innovators? For an interesting view on this from an historical perspective, see this recent paper by Tom Nicholas and others.
According to Robert Shiller , speaking at Davos, Bitcoin is a perfect example of a bubble - story here . Shiller sees Bitcoin as a backwards step in the evolution of money. George Selgin , a free banker, takes an opposing view - click here . Although he doesn't believe that Bitcoin is money, he sees its development as a fascinating turn in the evolution of money. In particular, he lauds the fact that Bitcoin production is constrained and cannot be infinite. There is a short video below where Bitcoin explain how it works.