Interview with Donald Luskin from The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid
Don’s 25-year career as an entrepreneur, executive, investment manager and commentator has been built around his passion for the application of technology and innovation to the challenge of investing.
Prior to founding Trend Macrolytics with David Gitlitz, Don was Vice Chairman and co-Chief Investment Officer of Barclays Global Investors, where he worked with the world’s largest institutional investors to create innovative indexing and quantitative investment management strategies.
After Barclays, Don was CEO and co-founder of MetaMarkets.com, and manager of the pathbreaking OpenFund — the world’s first mutual fund to disclose all its holdings and trading activity in real-time on the Internet.
Don was the inventor of the POSIT ECN, and founder of Investment Technology Group at Jefferies & Company. He has been a hedge fund manager and an options market maker on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the Pacific Stock Exchange, and the New York Stock Exchange.
Don runs a web-log based on his forthcoming book, The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid — in which he examines the obstacles to wealth creation by ordinary people. He is the author of Index Options and Futures: The Complete Guide, and editor of Portfolio Insurance: The Guide to Dynamic Hedging, both published by Wiley & Company.
Don’s columns are published weekly on SmartMoney.com and he contributes frequently to National Review Online, where he writes the Krugman Truth Squad column. He appears regularly on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company” and on Bloomberg TV, CNN and Fox News. He was formerly a columnist for TheStreet.com and Business 2.0. His commentaries have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Pensions & Investments, the American Spectator, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Detroit News.
Simon Owens: In our last interview, you indicated that the Mainstream Media rarely corrects its mistakes when they’re pointed out by bloggers. Do you think that the blogosphere has gained enough credibility over the last year that the MSM is taking it more seriously? I’ve noticed that more and more bloggers are being interviewed on cable news and writing opinion columns for major newspapers.
Donald Luskin: The MSM is certainly taking bloggers more seriously. They have to. Bloggers have become a huge force in molding public opinion. That doesn’t mean the MSM respects bloggers – after all, bloggers represent an incursion into what had formerly been an oligopoly.
Simon Owens: You’re one of many writers who have taken a book you wrote and expanded on with a blog. Another major example of this is the writers of the Freakonomics book who later turned it into a popular blog. What were you reasons for doing this?
Donald Luskin: This isn’t accurate in my case. My blog came BEFORE my book, and was intended to help me write it. It backfired. I still haven’t written the book.
Simon Owens: What do you think of the ecomony as it currently stands? Republicans claim it’s doing well but Democrats are quick to point financial disparity.
Donald Luskin: The Republicans are right. If there were a Democrat in the White House, they would be saying this economy is doing great, which it is.
Simon Owens: Is there any significant evidence that the hike in minimum wage will actually hurt small business? Previous wage hikes haven’t seemed to hurt business at all based on the statistics I’ve seen.
Donald Luskin: Forget the so-called statistics. An artificial price control on anything, including wages, distorts the market and causes the economy to operate less efficiently – thus hurting everyone, on average. It should be obvious from first principles that if you legislate a price for something higher than its value, then that thing will not trade. If you set a minimum wage, then you reduce the number of low-paying jobs. Small or large companies that depend on those jobs will go out of business. If this principle weren’t true, then why not set the minimum wage at $100,000 or $1,000,000 or infinity?
Simon Owens: Do you think the blogosphere is slowly taking away “elite” power in the media?
Donald Luskin: No. It is taking away that power quickly, not slowly.
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(Related posts: Writing entire books attacking people who wrote books about other people, Why Google News shouldn’t include blogs in its search results, How much money is your blog really worth? A Bloggasm case study
