Lelo Nxumalo

So I just finished reading Malcom Gladwell's 'Tipping Point'. One word - awesome! There are tons of interesting (and scientifically backed) factoids in this book, which Gladwell uses to illustrate how small things can lead to momentous changes. I highly recommend it. The book gets its title from an interesting sociological observation. Gladwell writes: Th[e] possibility of sudden change is at the center of the Tipping Point and might well be the hardest to accept. The expression first came into popular use in the 1970s to describe the flight to the suburbs of whites living in the older cities of the American Northeast. When the number of incoming African Americans in a particular neighborhood reached a certain point-20 percent, say-sociologists observed that the community would "tip": most of the remaining whites would leave almost immediately. The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point. I thought a bit about this, and my...

This is a comment to an op-ed piece that was published in the NY Times by Paul Krugman. Follow this link to the original article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/keynes-was-right.html?_r=1 I have been thinking about this article for some time now [because thats what I do :(], and I think there is merit to the argument that Hayek's work was written for a particular time, and that Keynes's theory is more general (hence the title of his seminal work). An economy ladden with too much government overreach is surely bound for 'serfdom' (Hayek's argument in a nutshell - read the "Road to Serfdom" for details). This is why classical liberal ideas appealed to me when I first came to this country. Having experienced hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, and the accompanying abuses by the state, Hayek, Ludvig von Mises, and the entire Austrian school really appealed to me. We must remember that Mises, Hayek's mentor, lived through the Nazi atrocities, and I be...