by Eric Feigenbaum When I first traveled to Thailand at age 23, friends warned me that should I ever encounter the police – for any reason, whether I was right or wrong – to quickly offer them 100 baht. One friend I made during my backpacking period got in trouble for smoking a joint on…

by Eric Feigenbaum Like the Montagues and Capulets, the owners of Zam Zam and Victory restaurants – adjacent to one another on Singapore’s North Bridge Road – have been at war for roughly a century. A one-time partnership turned bad led to two families operating restaurants with almost identical menus to operate in parallel. The…

by Eric Feigenbaum My great-grandparents were among the 12 million immigrants who passed through Ellis Island and equally a part of the wave of 20 million immigrants who entered the United States between 1880 and 1920. America’s fast-growing economy needed more manpower than its existing population had available, and the poorer classes of Europe were…

by Eric Feigenbaum Anyone who has ever watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit knows Los Angeles’ entire trajectory was changed dramatically in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s when politicians and planners of the day  – perhaps spurred by some alleged corruption – believed cars and freeways were the direction of the future and invested massively…

by Eric Feigenbaum Professor Paul Heyne practiced what he preached. I had the good fortune of having Professor Heyne’s Microeconomics class in my very first quarter at the University of Washington. He may have been tenured faculty whose own textbook we used, but he was a natural instructor who engaged students effortlessly. Which is no…

by Eric Feigenbaum Two of the most frightening words in America: Medical Debt. And this nightmare is not just something you hear as an anecdote or cautionary tale. One in three of the people reading these words are likely to have medical debt. In 2022 roughly 100 million Americans – almost one-third of the population…

by Eric Feigenbaum Singaporeans call it “The Moment of Anguish” – when their founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew broke down in tears announcing the independence of Singapore. There are relatively few surviving recordings of the actual event – a non-televised press conference on August 9, 1965 with international correspondents – but the still images…

by Eric Feigenbaum I noticed around the time I turned 30, conversations at parties and get-togethers inevitably turned toward real estate: how much homes cost in which neighborhood, who people know who had bought a house – and how. There was an innate understanding that financial success was tied into owning a home and in…

by Eric Feigenbaum For a strange five minutes in 1994, Americans were talking about caning. An American teenager named Michael Fay drew Singapore into the international spotlight when it sentenced him to six strokes of the rattan cane for vandalism and graffiti. Our nation was shocked to even learn what caning was, let alone that…