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I don’t talk about it very often, but one of the charitable organizations close to my heart are community food banks and soup kitchens. These non-profits collect groceries for those who can’t afford to feed themselves or their children, allowing them to avoid hunger. They resonate with something very deep in my core, maybe because I…
The economics of the movie theater industry are interesting. In many cases, up to 70% of the ticket price goes to the movie studio that created the film and the distributor who sold the rights to it, leaving the remaining 30% for the owners. This creates a situation where most of the profit comes from…
As an investor, you can make a lot of money if you are adept with numbers. This skill can let you see what is really going on and create mathematical models that maximize your earnings. There is a little known story that Warren Buffett was once in a meeting for Blockbuster, the movie rental chain that is now bankrupt.
You need to read this magnificent article in The New York Times that breaks down the economic phenomenon we went over several years ago when we looked at the work of Harvard Professor Charles Murray, who demonstrated that a significant driver of income inequality in the United States was caused by a radical shift in the…
We’ve talked so much about how no one, other than economists, want to discuss what is really driving a significant portion of income inequality – technological advancement – but I came across another perfect illustration of how radical the shift to a knowledge economy away from an industrial one has been for the labor force.…
We’ve done it again. Despite our own stupidity, and constant attempts to trip ourselves up with in-fighting, at this exact moment, by nearly every conceivable economic metric, the United States has the largest group of individual people enjoying a higher standard of living, more total wealth, longer median lifespans, and more free time than any other civilization that has ever existed, at any point in recorded human history. There has never been a point when life is better than it right now. You’re living it. I feel like we should go get a cake or something.
It’s time we talk about the debt ceiling and what a debt ceiling default would mean for the United States. I’ve avoided this conversation because I was hopeful we would never end up here, again, after the last round of stupidity. I’ve also avoided discussing the on-going shutdown of the Federal Government, despite some strong…
We’ve talked about income inequality a couple of years ago; specifically touching on the role of marriage patterns and assortative mating in household income levels. We’ve also discussed the economics of assortative mating more directly – the deeply ingrained tendency of people to marry other people like themselves with similar educational backgrounds, cultural values, personalities, and career orientations. One interesting result of this is that the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s planted seeds of radical income inequality that are just now coming to fruition. Of course, it’s not the only cause of income inequality, but it certainly does play a meaningful role in the gap that has developed between the well-heeled and the penurious.
The honey bee dance, also known as the honey bee waggle dance, is one of the most amazing things found in nature. To understand why it is so important, you need to appreciate how much we depend on the honey bee, how complex its hive behavior is, the specialization of tasks, and the ways in…
Across the Atlantic Ocean, several members of the European Union are experiencing an economic catastrophe that is, for them, on scale with what the United States went through during the Great Depression. To illustrate the depth of the pain using two examples, the unemployment rate in both Spain and Greece now stands at 27.2%.
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