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Paul Graham

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How to Earn a Billion Dollars

(This is based on a talk I gave at the Oxford Union.) Since this is apparently the future prime ministers' club, I'm going to tell you about something it would be good if more politicians understood: I'm going to tell y…

How to Convert Between Wealth and Income Tax

How do you convert between wealth and income tax? If a government imposes a wealth tax of 1%, what's the equivalent in income tax? It's clear from the way most politicians talk about the subject that they not only don't…

The Brand Age

In the early 1970s, disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of three separate disasters that all happened at about the same time. The first was compe…

The Shape of the Essay Field

An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But there are three different reasons people might not know something, and they yield three very different kinds of essays. One reason people won't know som…

Good Writing

There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things. It might seem as if thes…

What to Do

What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it myself in the process…