Kabbalah and Economics
What Kabbalah's progression from receiving to giving can teach us about violence, free markets, socialism, and low time preference.
About me
I'm a software developer, author, open source maintainer, amateur weightlifter, and inveterate learner. I've spent much of my career around Haskell and Rust, but the subjects here range much further afield.
I live in Maalot, Israel, with my wife Miriam and our six children.
Recent writing
Kabbalah, Haskell, and the ST Monad
A surprising analogy between Haskell's immutability and ST monad, and the Kabbalistic idea that spiritual states are never erased.
Who pays a tax?
When the government adds a new tax, such as Trump's tariffs, who absorbs the cost of the tax?
The Paradox of Necessary Force
Many of us dream of living in a world without any violence. Let's explore why at least the threat of violence will always be necessary.
Incentives Determine Outcomes
Why do people do seemingly irrational things? What is moral hazard? This and much more is explained through incentives.
Publications
- Begin Rust. June 2020
- Performance of Open Source Applications. November 2013
- Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume 2. May 2012
- Developing Web Apps with Haskell and Yesod. April 2012, O'Reilly
- Warp: A Haskell Web Server. June 2011, IEEE Spectrum, The Functional Web
Talks
Rustikon 2025, Poland ·
2025-03
Strongly Typed Financial Conference
Video · Slides (PPT) · Slides (PDF)
LambdaConf 2020 Global Edition ·
2020-05
Economic Argument for Functional Programming
Slides · Video
Functional Conf 2019 ·
2019-11
Applied Haskell workshop
LambdaConf 2018 ·
2018-06
Haskell Hackathon
LambdaConf 2018 ·
2018-05
Applied Haskell (two day training)
LambdaWorld ·
2017-10
Everything you didn't want to know about monad transformer state
Slides · Video
LambdaConf 2017 ·
2017-05
Web Programming and Streaming Data in Haskell
Slides · Video (1) · Video (2)
LambdaConf 2017 ·
2017-05
Applied Haskell (two day training)