Why Academy Award Winners Might Live Longer

Relating income inequality to the stress felt by low status Bolivian Tsimane men and academy award losers, researchers said that stress that harms health.

Weekly Roundup: From Turkey to Buffalo

This week’s everyday economics include competition, oligopoly, marginal cost and benefit, GDP growth, unemployment, supply and demand, OPEC, redistribution.

A Bigger (Thanksgiving) Pie or Equal Slices?

Increasing income inequality by moving from communal farming to individual plots, Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford changed income redistribution.

Should Water Be Free?

Although protestors in Detroit and Ireland say water is a human right, economists, citing a definition of a public good and a tornado alarm, would disagree.

John Stuart Mill on Affordable Health Care

A child prodigy, 19th century economist John Stuart Mill said in his Autobiography that, “I have no remembrance of the time when I began Greek; I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest…

Would You Share Your Tuition, Your Income and Your Grades?

When are you willing to share what you have earned? College tuition? While the yearly sticker price for Duke, Harvard or Wellesley is close to $60,000, not everyone pays it. At Wellesley College, close to 40% of all students pay…

What Can We Learn From Downton Abbey Economics?

Downton Abbey can tell us a lot about the British economy…but not everything. We know the aristocracy is struggling. Many of the 700 families who had controlled 80% of all acreage during the 1870s faced financial collapse 50 years later.…

Income Inequality Questions

Seeing economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty’s favorite graph of the year at Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog, I thought of Benoit Mandelbrot. The father of fractal geometry, Dr. Mandelbrot told us that the closer you look, the more you see. From a…