Economic Growth

February 26, 2014

Tall and Short Populations

Princeton economist Angus Deaton estimates that it will take 500 years for Indian women to reach the height of English women. In The Great Escape, Dr. […]

February 23, 2014

The Plight of the Night Owl

I must start with my bias. I am a night owl. So too were Winston Churchill and Charles Darwin, James Joyce and Glenn Gould. In one […]

February 16, 2014

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 […]

February 9, 2014

Problems With the Unemployment Rate

Almost everyone is saying the unemployment rate is a problem. At 6.6% and with job creation at 113,000, the numbers reflect a troubled jobs market. The […]

February 6, 2014

A Surprising Connection Between Tennessee and the Affordable Care Act

There is probably a tradeoff between health insurance and the demand for jobs. During 2005 in Tennessee, the demand for jobs increased when 170,000 people lost their Medicaid […]

February 4, 2014

Brazil’s World Cup To-Do List

Preparing its transportation infrastructure for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, Brazil has one giant to-do list. In the air and on the ground, it […]

January 30, 2014

Have We Halved the Deficit?

In the State-of-the-Union, President Obama said, “Our deficits–cut by more than half.” Looking at the federal deficit as a percent of GDP, we can say that the […]

January 23, 2014

One Reason That $1.1 Trillion is Not So Much

The Congress just agreed on $1.1 trillion in federal spending. But let’s look a bit more closely… Each year, I give my class a federal budget […]

January 22, 2014

One Way That the “Poor Beat the Rich”

In just 8 minutes, Hans Rosling shows us that, with child mortality rates, the developing world is making more progress than we might expect. With his […]

January 20, 2014

The Revolution That Grandma Started

The NYC Miss Subways competition was about a lot more than pretty “girls” (as they were called). To become Miss Subways for a month, applicants had […]

January 16, 2014

Connecting Abigail Adams to Janet Yellen

Reading about “touch generations” in Sam Arbesman’s Wired Magazine blog, I realized that Abigail Adams and Janet Yellen were connected. Different generations touch when one’s birth year coincides with someone else’s […]

January 15, 2014

The Green Blog: Why Japan Might Face a Demographic Crisis

By Madeleine Vance, guest blogger and student at Kent Place School. As of late, younger Japanese citizens are choosing to live the single life rather than […]