The Dangerous Economist

In 2006, economist Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel peace prize (not the economics prize). What did he do? "He invented microcredit, the pr...

Our discipline assumes that economic factors influence behavior. Here is a good example. Read Older Moms' Births Still Up in U.S . Here ...

Maybe. This past week in my macro courses I talked about the money demand motives. One of them is the speculative motive, so I explained wha...

You can read it at A Consumption Tax, Revisited . It also contains a link to the article that my letter addressed. What got printed in the p...

It seems that they have something everyone wants: prestige. Who wouldn't want to go to Harvard or Yale, for example? And then these scho...

No, not exactly. Everyone pays some kind of taxes, but many people don't pay any federal income taxes. See Nearly half of US households ...

See the WSJ article titled Economy's Excess Capacity Reins In Prices: Latest Data Give Fed Room to Maintain Rock-Bottom Interest Rates; ...

Yes. But it has been hard on many people. This issue came up in a recent WSJ article titled College Grads' Outlook Grim: Students Begin ...

April first 2010 will go down in history. Click White Sox Sign Obama For Left-handed Bullpen Support to read all about it.

There is no perfect man, a woman has to give up one quality if she wants more of another, just the kind of thing that economics would predic...

That is what a New York Times article called Carrots, Sticks and Lower Premiums suggests. The article says: "...the one thing that cou...

That was the idea in How Men’s Overconfidence Hurts Them as Investors , from the New York Times, 3-14-10. Here are some interesing exerpts: ...

Okay, it is not the book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (this is a link to the entire book online). I will come back to this boo...

Last week I attended a lecture by Paul Zak, a neuro-economist from Claremont Graduate University, at the the Mind Science Foundation . He ha...

That is the title of an article that you can read by clicking here . The idea is that the listed price is very high by grants and scholarshi...

On the first day of each semester, I define a scarce good as one for which there is not enough to go around when it is given away for free. ...

So said an enthusiastic character in the 1934 movie Stand Up and Cheer! . We watched a video about the Great Depression in my macro classes....

After the last post, my students might wonder what "deadweight loss" is. It is the loss of social welfare caused by that dreaded d...

No, really, there is. My students will find this hard to believe after the groaners I tell in class. But Yoram Bauman, who has a Ph. D. in e...

This week in one of my classes we read a chapter titled ""Bye, Bye Bison" from the book The Economics of Public Issues . The ...