Monthly Archives: December 2024
Credit Rating Agencies – Folie à Trois
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 30th December 2024There are three credit agencies that provide consumer reports. They are Transunion, Experian, and Equifax. They’re all addled. Below are the factors that they say they use to determine an individual’s credit score. Below that is what they really do. Payment historyOn-time payments is the number one factor credit scoring agencies use to assign a…
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Why the Covid Epidemic Ended and How Best to Combat the Next One
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 26th December 2024The late and unlamented epidemic was an exercise in misapprehension. My subject is to explain its brief course as a preparative against the next respiratory virus that achieves epidemic proportions. COVID-19 lasted about three years, just as did the flu pandemic of a century earlier. However, it was far less lethal than its predecessor, killing…
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Joseph Schumpeter and a Broken Jar of Coffee
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 22nd December 2024Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) was an Austrian political economist. After a distinguished career in Germany, he emigrated to the US in 1932. He taught at Harvard for the remaining 18 years of his life. In 1942 he published his best-known work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. He is famous for creative destruction a term he borrowed to…
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More on Hayek
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 16th December 2024Fourteen years ago I wrote a brief article about Frederich Hayek’s essay Individualism and Economic Order. Now 50 years after he won the Noble Prize in Economics I happened upon another of the great man’s essays The Use of Knowledge in Society. It focuses on one of Hayek’s major insights – the diffusion of knowledge…
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Respighi and Verdi
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 11th December 2024Below are the program notes I wrote for the upcoming concert of the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra – Saturday, January 18, 2025. Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) was the only important Italian composer of his era better known for his instrumental works than for his operas. Though he wrote nine operas, they are almost never performed. His orchestral compositions, on the…
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Feodor Chaliapin
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 4th December 2024Feodor Chaliapin ( 1873-1938) was perhaps the greatest singing actor of the 20th century. His voice was on a par with Caruso’s (also born in February 1873) while his acting ability was at least equal to that of Maria Callas. He was born to a peasant family in Kazan Russia. After vocal studies with a…
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