What an Economist Might Say on Valentine’s Day

Since it’s almost Valentine’s Day, let’s see what economists could say:

Economic Valentines

We’ve added to some of our past favorites:

Minneapolis Fed

• “Love is warm, so is a cup of tea, but we need big banks, to hold lots more equity.”

Atlanta Fed

• “Being with you hikes my pulse by several basis points.”

Philadelphia Fed

• “My initial projections never forecast someone like you would be in my next quarter.”

The Chicago Fed (not quite romantic)

• “To raise, or not to raise? That is the question.”

Econlife

Maybe the invisible hand will nudge you to me.

Valentine’s Graphs

In addition, as economists, we know that sometimes a graph says it all, especially when it displays the impossible:

But, we can ask if we should always listen to our data:

Cartoons

Marginal Utility

To a Valentine, we can display the unlikelihood of increasing marginal utility:

And how love’s game theory can be problematic:

Venn Diagram

Or a Venn Diagram could be an economic Valentine:

Surveys

Then, we can see from Pew how we really select our mates. Although their data is from 2013, I hope it remains valid:

And to everyone, from econlife, we send this Sierpinshi Valentine:

Our Bottom Line: The Dismal Science

Our economic Valentines display that economics need not be the dismal science.

However, it never really was.

The Scottish writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle was the person that called economics “the dismal science.” Some said he had been responding to Malthus’s theory that we were all ultimately doomed as population out-produced the earth’s resources. However, now, instead, it appears that Carlyle found it dismal that he could not defend West Indies slavery with economics. For that we can all be happy.

My sources and more: While our economic Valentines were originally inspired by Freaknomics and xkcd, the cleverest examples were from Liz Fosslien. Then, moving onward, at econlife, we have looked at the economic way to find your match and Valentine rose markets and checked for more facts from Pew Research. Please note that our featured image is from The Atlantic.