Economic Growth

September 1, 2015

What Our Food Says About Us

Because middling food like hamburgers is consumed by most people in the affluent West, what we eat does not necessarily reflect inequality or social status.

August 24, 2015

How Your Lawn is About More Than Grass

Nothing but grass, lawns began as conspicuous consumption from the English and French aristocracy and now are a middle class manicured status symbol.

August 12, 2015

How to Deal With Skyscraper Shadows

Whenever a new skyscraper is built, we can ask whether its shadow violates our property rights when it eliminates the sunlight in a city's parks.

August 2, 2015

The World’s Sanitation Gap

A production possibilities graph can display the land, labor and capital underutilization that inadequate sanitation creates and indicate a constrained GDP.

July 17, 2015

The Wright Moment for the Bicycle

As an innovation, the bicycle was a stepping stone that helped human capital move onward to other inventions like the airplane, the auto and better roads.

July 7, 2015

The Tax We Should Like

Among the least popular forms of taxation, property taxes are the most desirable because of their incentives, whom they target and their resilience.

June 22, 2015

An Unintended Consequence of Football Helmets

Regulation can have unintended consequences. With football helmets or seat belts or even financial regulation, protection can create more reckless behavior.

June 1, 2015

India’s Height Mystery

Long assumed to have a direct relationship, the connection between height and GDP becomes more complex when we compare India and Africa.

May 21, 2015

What Bread Says About Women

Through the industrialization of just one slice of bread, we can see the history of the U.S. economy since the beginning of the 20th century.

May 13, 2015

Why the Social Security Crisis Has Begun

Caused by aging baby boomers, expanded criteria and the remnants of the great recession, SSDI entitlement spending is approaching insolvency.

March 27, 2015

The Dangerous Side of Economics

Because he revised his country's inaccurate deficit and received Eurostat approval, Greece's chief statistician might be prosecuted for "breach of faith."