This is my entry for the 2nd Summer of Math Exposition contest.

Radix economy is often billed as a measure of which number base is most “efficient,” but its answer that base-3 is the best suggests there’s probably something else going on. In this video, I explain what radix economy is actually used for and when its use is not really justified.

In a future video, I’ll talk about what makes a base good in natural language.