When I graduated from college I had a firm opinion. I felt I had to move to either Boston on San Francisco. This was based a book I’d read. Jane Jacob’s book about the economic basin that surrounds a city. Here is a nice lecture she gave in 1983 about the topic. The gist [...]
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Over the years i’ve spent a lot of time thinking, reading, etc. about economic inequality. This talk (ted) is amazing, and in a sense it comes down to this chart, which answers a key question: what is income inequality correlated with? So we now know that income inequality has high social costs, or to say it [...]
This is a fascinating interview with David Graeber, an anthropologist, about the origins of money. For years now I’ve been convinced that where is something curiously wrong with the presumption that “the books balance.” One way I talk about that is to ask: “Wouldyou rather die with people owing you, or with you owing them?” [...]
Damian Dovarganes of the AP wrote this peice about the effect of gas prices on household budgets; it’s interesting how an piece like that spreads. Google shows it in over 400 news outlets from Fox to NPR. I am not interested in the article, but this factoid: it says that American households spend on average [...]
Saturday, September 25, 2010
If it wasn’t so bleak I’d find this chart amusing. I love the idea that we can reduce the worries of business owners to just four things; for sake it doesn’t even call out the five things that your freshman business major is is taught to worry about. It is obvious this data series [...]
Plucked from this poignant post about externalities (which reminds me of my realization that limited liability corporations evolved from pirates) is this bit from a Rolling Stone article. It’s a nice clean example of cost benefit analysis in the “real world.” BP has also cut corners at the expense of its own workers. In 2005, 15 [...]
Paul Krugman is much amused by the realization that the origin of Pigouvian taxes(i.e. the idea that the temptation to dump your pollution into the community water supply might be tempered by a tax on such behavior) never actually mentions pollution but rather only mentions the problem where in one landowner’s enthusiasm for hunting causes a [...]
The library of congress has an wonderful collection of photographs taken at sardine packing plants. Thus I came to learn the word cartoner. Which was once a person, but is now a machine. Today comes news that the last such cannery in the US is shutting down, along with a few pictures. This all resonates [...]
“This Time is Different” is a fascinating book. It’s full of provocative confusing details. It does a wonderful job of helping to further the cause of making it clear economics has got a lot of work yet to do. There are lots of different large economic scale failure modes. Inflation, deflation, international debt default, intra-national debt default, etc. [...]
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
I’m still chewing on the idea of guard labor, so a pile of random thoughts I’ve been having. Businesses adapt the ratio between guard labor v.s. productive labor. That ratio varies across firms within industries, from one industry to another, and inside of firms from on department to another. Presumably there is a great deal [...]
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