Brian Gongol
Technology and Natural Resource Issues
- Reasons for and against applying a surcharge to bulk e-mail
- If everyone tried to live in extreme sustainable communities, it would hurt the environment
- Making the Internet More Efficient for Business Users
A proposal for replacing the gas tax
- Saran Wrap® and Victory Gardens: The Economics of World Foodstocks
- Why boycotting oil companies won't solve high gas prices
- How big prizes could solve our energy problems without higher taxes
- Rethinking the Aid Curve -- why direct aid isn't enough
- Grading GDP Growth
- Does the US Manufacture Anything Anymore? Yes.
- The good and bad consequences of debt forgiveness
- Comparing stages of economic growth
- Why the United States should look to Latin America as a strategic and economic partner
- For those who favor Western (American)-style economic growth and political freedoms, there is an urgent need to make the case for growth
- The economic big picture, explaining that this really is the best economy we've ever had
- Measuring returns on government investment
- How improving access to advanced degrees could improve economic development
- The lifesaving properties of economic growth
- Improving the understanding of supply and demand to include human nature
- Five big economic threats to the United States
- The State of Market Thinking in 2005
- Understanding the human cost of business failures
- Pride in one's work
- Why it's foolish work to regulate tastes and preferences
- How anti-capitalists fundamentally misunderstand creative destruction and how free markets are really the best elixir for the world's ills
- Why we need to stop using the word "safe"
- How freeing the slaves of the Confederacy through a buyout could have been much less expensive than waging war
- How economics can prevent disasters
- An alternative solution to terrorism that moves beyond the broken top-down model
- When to negotiate with terrorists and kidnappers
- Why virtuous politicians usually have to be irrational
- How the "War on Terror" is killing the Voice of America, and why that's a profoundly bad move
- Why pseudoscience isn't just fun and games -- it's a social ill with real costs
- Why ranchers and Wall Street brokers don't respect each other: Skill sets come from different stages
- Why people should consider offering inducement prizes instead of (or in addition to) giving money away in their wills
- Social Security and pension programs: What to do about compulsory old-age savings
- On the rationality of donating money to humanitarian-relief efforts
- If it is in fact a worthwhile policy goal, here is how to control big business. Especially since people will usually try to do so even if it's a bad idea.
- How a rational analysis of the threat posed by terrorism suggests we should be more concerned about other problems that actively take more lives
- The public decision-maker's checklist
- Why big cities aren't always better places to live
- Evaluating the good and bad results of city-county consolidation and mergers
- What's wrong with modern economic development incentives and packages, and how to do the job right
- Using demolition bonds to prevent urban decay
- The economics of municipal utilities
- The 100-year business plan: Rarely used, but highly useful
- The 2008 economic-stimulus package, by the numbers
- Comparative ages of the largest companies in the US, UK, EU, Japan, Australia, and Canada
- South Korea's Managed Economy
- An overview of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, prepared for a class in business law.
- An econometric study of the Toronto Stock Exchange
- Three lessons to unlearn from Donald Trump
- A history of great company names
- Notes from the 2012 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders' meeting
- Economic attitudes of the 2008 Presidential candidates
- Proposal for my senior thesis under the Presidential Scholar program at the University of Northern Iowa
- A text listing of sites on Brazilian economics
- Could Iowa's budget problem be solved with staff reductions?
- Is musicianship a depleting asset? (in progress)
- Newspapers of the world by printed size
- Screen dimensions of handheld Internet devices
- Why people shouldn't use "click here" as link text
- What else could have been done to get the word out about the South Asian tsunami disaster of 2004
- Finding the right amount of nationalism
- Why talk radio will always contain more opinion than research
- Links to broadcasting history sites
- Links to trends in communications
- A paper that answers the question: What Would Francis Bacon Say About South Park?
- A directory of commercial aviation sites and magazines
- Causes of media bias
- A summary of situations illustrating that you're always on the record in the Internet era
- Observations on good and bad campaign logos
- Priorities for institutional websites
- The Hurricane Katrina diaspora
- Lessons to be learned from Hurricane Katrina
- Methods of Mass Evacuation
- Using cost-benefit analysis to combat the myth of "sparing no expense"
- Evacuation by automobile
- Business continuity in a disaster
- Incentives for renewable energy in Iowa
- Examples of when government is in the wrong, offering counter-examples to the old saw, "If you aren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about"
- Open-source programs used to build this site
- The history of the Bell System
- A group paper on the subjects of Internet chat rooms, MUDs, and instant-messaging programs
- "Web of Control", a brief guide to HTML first delivered at a student leadership seminar
- A report on the Navajo Code-Talkers of World War II
- Links to science and technology news
- Is our military readiness slipping?
- A defense of a natural right: Objectivism and Free Speech (based on a case study for a class in communications ethics)
- The Aryabhatiya, one of the foundations of Indian mathematics (by William Gongol)
- Consumer goods
- Consolidation and Efficiencies in the Radio Industry (Brian Gongol's senior thesis in industrial organization at UNI) - public presentation