Thursday, January 25, 2018

Can adding a phantom third story to their homes help families find a wife for their son?

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See Supply, Demand and Marriage by economist Robert Frank. Maybe this shows how powerful supply and demand works if it can help explain ma...
3 comments:
Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Another Semester Has Started

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Welcome to any new students. The entries usually have something to do with a basic economic principle that is related to a recent news stor...
1 comment:
Monday, January 15, 2018

China Is Ahead Of The U.S. In Mobile Payments

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I use a book in my class called The Economics of Macro Issues by Roger LeRoy Miller & Daniel K. Benjamin. One of the chapters is called...
5 comments:
Sunday, January 14, 2018

Does collective self-deception mask selfish behavior?

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Adam Smith talked about how people act on their own self-interest yet are led to help society by the invisible hand. But don't we see pe...
Saturday, January 13, 2018

Bumble Bee agrees to plead guilty in tuna price fixing scheme

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By Julia Horowitz of CNN . This is from last May, but it makes for a good anti-trust case and it also mentions "limited competition in...
Friday, January 12, 2018

Do We Need Failure Stories As Much As We Need Success Stories?

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See Why success stories are just propaganda by Martin Weigel. I might not agree with all of this, but it raises important issues. Looking...
Thursday, January 11, 2018

Are Low Wages Causing Texas Prison Guards To Seek Other Employment?

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In economics, we think that labor supply curves slope upward. That is, when the wage in a certain occupation rises (while holding all other ...
Wednesday, January 10, 2018

How Metrics Or Formulas That Supposedly Measure Quality Of Services Can Create Incentives To Engage In Misleading Behavior

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See Metrics and Their Unintended Consequences: The best intentions combine with imprecise data for perverse effects in health care and educa...
Tuesday, January 09, 2018

Just Four Large Countries Have a Higher Debt Burden Than the U.S.

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By Josh Zumbrun of The WSJ . Excerpts: "As of 2017, the general government gross debt of the U.S. stood at 108.1% of gross domestic ...
Monday, January 08, 2018

13 economists on the research that shaped our world in 2017

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From Quartz . Excerpts (with just my three favorites listed-you can see all 13 if you click on the link): "At the end of every year,...
Sunday, January 07, 2018

Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History

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By Nicholas Kristof of The NY Times . Excerpts: "2017 was probably the very best year in the long history of humanity. A smaller ...
2 comments:
Friday, January 05, 2018

2017 Was The Fourth Straight Year With At Least A 0.5 Increase In The Percentage Of 25-54 Year-olds Employed

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One weakness of the unemployment rate is that if people drop out of the labor force they cannot be counted as an unemployed person and the ...
Thursday, January 04, 2018

The Price of Prejudice

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By Morten Størling Hedegaard and Jean-Robert Tyran . American Economic Journal: Applied Economics vol. 10, no. 1, Janua...
Wednesday, January 03, 2018

The San Antonio Express-News Printed An Article By Me

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Is giving back the best approach? ESPN writer Michael C. Wright writer recently reported a comment by Spurs coach Gregg Popovich on why...
Tuesday, January 02, 2018

The surprising link between science fiction and economic history

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By Sebastian Buckup . He is Head of Programming, Global Programming Group, Member of the Executive Committee, World Economic Forum. Today i...
Monday, January 01, 2018

Major Issues Facing The Fed

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See New Priorities for a New Fed Regime: Incoming leadership should make maintaining financial stability one of the central bank’s goals b...
Sunday, December 31, 2017

Using The Market (ala Airbnb) To Help Migrating Birds

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See Using the Airbnb Model to Protect the Environment by Seema Jayachandran in The NY Times. Seema Jayachandran is an economics professor ...
Saturday, December 30, 2017

Higher economic status can offset lower physical attractiveness in men much more easily than in women

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See Different impacts of resources on opposite sex ratings of physical attractiveness by males and females . "Abstract Parental in...
Friday, December 29, 2017

Can the Robot Revolution Create Enough Jobs?

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See How the Robot Revolution Could Create 21 Million Jobs: Data detective, man-machine teaming managers: some of the ways human workers are ...
Thursday, December 28, 2017

Why Economics Is Really Called 'the Dismal Science': The (not-so-dismal) origin myth of a ubiquitous term

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By Derek Thompson of The Atlantic Monthly . From 2013. "The story goes like this: Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish writer and philosopher,...