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Stay Curious.
Make the most of your college experience.
Jeff Hulett
Curator, The Curiosity Vine
Stay Curious.
The Curiosity Vine is an idea incubator.
Our contributors have experience and interest in a variety of high-impact topics, such as science, technology, conservation, mathematics, data science, public policy, economics, and others. Our objective is to promote early-stage ideas, enable idea collaboration, and test idea purchase.
TCV platform is curated by Jeff Hulett.
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TCV's ideas are used to provide seminars, write books, build businesses, and especially to help people.
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Featured Posts
Economics Personality: An Evolutionary Process
My Economics Personality I study and "do" economics all the time. But have you ever stepped back and thought about your economics personality? For me, it has been evolving throughout my life. When I was younger, I would have identified much more with economists like John Maynard Keynes or Paul Samuelson—focusing on centralized equilibrium models, state intervention, and macroeconomic levers. Today, my economic personality has evolved toward liberty, spontaneous order, and rea
Demystifying Backpropagation: The 300-Year-Old Calculus Rule Powering Modern AI
Modern artificial intelligence systems rely on an underlying algorithm to learn: Backpropagation. Whether predicting text, recognizing images, or translating languages, neural networks depend on this universal mechanism. The core mathematical mechanism behind backpropagation is not a recent invention. The algorithm relies on a calculus rule formulated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1676: the chain rule. To understand how modern AI works, we examine how this centuries-old mat
Bridging the AI Divide: Moving Higher Education from Hesitation to Integration
"If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." — Socrates (in Plato's Phaedrus) Educators have long questioned how new tools alter human cognition. Socrates was not warning against algorithms, but the newest technology of his era: the written word. New classroom technologies seld
Making the Invisible Hand Visible: How Choice Architecture Operationalizes Economics
The Invisible Hand is an observation of our human nature. Adam Smith studied how people naturally operate within social settings. He then applied those behavioral insights to explain how societies generate lasting wealth. Long-term empirical trends support his core insights. Over the past two centuries, global economic data reveals unprecedented rises in real gross domestic product per capita alongside dramatic increases in global life expectancy. In 1776, Adam Smith publishe
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The Desert and the Buffet: Why We Need the Kinison Fix for Trade
Years ago, comedian Sam Kinison famously shouted at a documentary crew filming a segment on famine: "You live in a desert! Nothing grows here! Nothing is ever going to grow here! You see this? This is sand! Know what it’s gonna be in a hundred years? It’s gonna be sand! MOVE TO WHERE THE FOOD IS!" His advice, delivered with signature intensity, captured a fundamental economic truth. We see this play out in the mid-2020s as the nation navigates the consequences of the "Trump
Jeff Hulett
Apr 76 min read
Treasury Rates Update: April 2nd, 2026
As we cross into the second quarter of 2026, the Treasury market has staged a significant retreat from the yield peaks observed in late March. Drawing on my experience, this week’s broad-based decline across the term structure suggests a market recalibrating its outlook as it prepares for a barrage of top-tier economic data. The benchmark 10-year Treasury rate dropped 11 basis points (bp) this week, paring much of its recent climb and leaving the rate up only 6bp on a cumulat
Jeff Hulett
Apr 41 min read
Mortgage Rates Update: April 2nd, 2026
The mortgage market experienced a sharp upward correction during the week ending April 2, 2026, marking a significant departure from the relative stability we observed last month. As an economist who monitors the delicate risk balance in lending, I find this week's data particularly striking due to the rapid expansion of the market spread. While the 10 Year Treasury rate increased by a notable 11 basis points to reach 4.31 percent, the 30 year fixed mortgage rate surged by 30
Jeff Hulett
Apr 41 min read
The RepDem Trap and the Fight for a Real Republic
Every election cycle, the same question arrives with predictable urgency. My wife asks it with a mix of frustration and genuine curiosity: "Why do you throw your vote away?" She watches me mark the box for a Libertarian candidate—someone with zero chance of occupying the Oval Office—and sees a wasted opportunity to influence the immediate lesser of two evils. To her, a vote is a tactical wager. To me, it is a moral declaration. I understand her perspective. In a binary system
Jeff Hulett
Apr 47 min read
What Students Should Know About Credit Before Signing Their First Lease
Image Credit A first lease is often treated as a simple housing decision, yet a credit review is usually attached to it. For many students, that step is underestimated until an application is denied, a larger deposit is requested, or a guarantor is required. Credit isn’t just a banking topic. It’s often used by landlords to measure payment risk, reliability, and financial stability. Before any lease is signed, a basic understanding of credit should be developed. That knowledg
Jeff Hulett
Mar 275 min read
Treasury Rates Update: February 26th, 2026
As we move further into the wake of the March Federal Reserve meeting, the Treasury market has delivered a striking, broad-based surge in yields. From my perspective, this aggressive upward move across the entire term structure indicates that the market is repricing for sustained inflationary pressures and a potentially more restrictive policy path. The 10-year Treasury rate jumped 17 basis points (bp) this week, bringing the cumulative two-week increase to 15bp. This shift w
Jeff Hulett
Mar 271 min read
Mortgage Rates Update: March 26th, 2026
The mortgage market experienced continued upward pressure during the week ending March 26, 2026, as rates climbed further into territory not seen since earlier this year. As an economist who tracks the interplay between government yields and consumer borrowing costs, I observed that the 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose by 16 basis points to 6.38 percent. This move was slightly more conservative than the 17 basis point surge in the 10 Year Treasury rate, which reached 4.42 per
Jeff Hulett
Mar 271 min read
Book Review: Finding the Balance in The Soul of Money
Recommend with caveats. Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money is a book arriving like a deep breath in a room full of suffocating consumerism. It is an exploration of "sufficiency"—the idea that we are enough and have enough. If you’ve ever felt the relentless pull of "more" or found yourself nodding along to Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money , this book serves as a spiritual and philosophical companion to Housel’s more pragmatic take on wealth. However, as someone who writ
Jeff Hulett
Mar 244 min read
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