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From The Stalwart’s review of Bernd Heinrich’s Bumblebee Economics:
… a species can be conceived as a firm that’s grown to specialize in tapping certain energy reserves throughout nature. In the case of bumblebees, one could think of them as a hedge fund that specializes in micro-arbitrage opportunities — available profits that are too small [...]

An argument for retail health care by Michael Goodfellow, by way of Marginal Revolution. Following an overview of the factors that actually influence life expectancy, he writes:

There’s no reason to insure yourself against the ordinary expenses. We do that now, and just end up paying for it in premiums instead of retail, but with the [...]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of the excellent Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, and more recently The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which I’ve not read yet) discusses what he is optimistic about: The Birth of Stochastic Science. He laments the fact that too [...]

This month’s Reason has an interesting interview with Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, noting the influence of Hayek’s ideas on spontaneous order.
Wales’ latest venture, Wikia, is a service that allows users to set up their own wiki communities. The rules (or lack thereof) appear to be roughly the same as those of Wikipedia. I’m not sure [...]