Category Archives: economics

Buying lottery tickets can be rational, and it can be a means to the end of investing your money for the right reasons rather than the wrong reasons. But it’s still a great way of losing money, and most people … Continue reading →

Zubin Jelveh reports on the Congressional Medal of Honor: In all wars before World War I, less than 10 percent of honorees died in battle. After WWI through Vietnam, the probability of dying increased from 25 percent to between 60 … Continue reading →

You’re asked to allocate $10,000 between four S&P 500 index funds. The first has a front-end of 2.5% and charges fees of 60bp per year; the second has a front-end of 5.25% and charges fees of 64bp per year; the … Continue reading →

Paul Schemm reports from Egypt: Earlier this year, the state-owned manufacturer Eastern Tobacco Company voluntarily put pictures of diseased lungs on some packs — but smokers just figured those packs were the ones that were harmful and switched to others, … Continue reading →

UC Irvine professor Richard McKenzie has been getting quite a bit of press for his latest book, Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies, And Other Pricing Puzzles. McKenzie did a fair amount of real-world research on the popcorn … Continue reading →

David Brooks did a good job yesterday of focusing the econoblogosphere’s attention on a report entitled "For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture". Or at least he would have done, if it weren’t for the fact that the report … Continue reading →

I just got around to reading Aditya Chakrabortty’s account of going shopping with Dan Ariely: Three Chinese-origin boys are motoring down the aisle, their trolley stacked high with cheese-and-tomato spaghetti ready meals. They are engineering students. "Did your parents teach … Continue reading →

Brad DeLong doesn’t think much of the Harvard economics department as a place for undergraduates: My years as a junior faculty member and as head tutor of economics make me think that there is an enormous disproportion between resource inputs … Continue reading →

From Bryan Appleyard’s profile of Taleb in the Sunday Times: Taleb’s fee for a speaking engagement: "about $60,000" Taleb’s advance on his next book: $4 million Taleb’s profits on Black Monday: "$35m to $40m" And then there’s Taleb’s new health … Continue reading →

This piqued my interest (via Mike Simonson): Ignorance about recessions has taken hold because of a simplistic idea that a recession is two successive quarterly declines in gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the nation’s output. The idea originated … Continue reading →

If you haven’t been following the peculiar story of Harvard’s failure to poach Christina and David Romer from Berkeley, Shan Wang of the Harvard Crimson has a good round-up. Basically, it was all going to happen, until the very last … Continue reading →

Carl Icahn has an interesting take on basic macroeconomics: Icahn kicked off his political rant by saying that it would be "devastating" if this country elected a Democratic president… He said that "Obama doesn’t understand the economy," adding that he … Continue reading →

A quick note about the new GDP forecasts from the Fed: Policy makers estimate U.S. gross domestic product will increase by 0.3 percent to 1.2 percent this year, compared to the 1.3 percent to 2 percent growth they predicted in … Continue reading →

Aaron Schiff says that it’s "very cheap" to rent a DVD in Japan: he pays ¥350 ($3.39) for an overnight new release. Here in Berlin, it’s €3.40 ($5.36) to rent a DVD overnight. But there’s a twist: the headline rental … Continue reading →

Steve Levitt helpfully provides a link to the Broda and Romalis paper that Jim Surowiecki references this week, and whose findings I found so startling. After reading the paper, whose findings on inflation rates are by no means easy to … Continue reading →