Macroeconomic Measurement

January 20, 2015

How Chocolate Chip Cookies Explain Why We Save Less

Explained by behavioral economics, we save relatively little for retirement because of intertemporal selfishness and seeing our future selves as strangers.

January 8, 2015

Understanding a New Tax Issue

With the House requiring dynamic scoring of tax legislation from the CBO, the bigger tax debate resurfaces on how much redistribution and spending.

December 28, 2014

Why the Metric Switch is so Tough

The expense and complexities of switching to the metric system have prevented the change, and have affected how standard weights and measures help globalization.

December 16, 2014

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.

December 11, 2014

Is Your Favorite Economist Biased?

Illustrated through word use and data selection in research, politically liberal and conservative economists display a tendency toward confirmation bias.

December 9, 2014

Expanding How We Measure Inflation

Our CPI measure of the inflation rate has been debated because it could be calculated using a chained CPU, could be real time, and excludes some seniors.

November 30, 2014

Three Graphs That Tell the Whole Oil Story

Following the law of supply, U.S. shale oil firms will lower output because OPEC is letting price plummet but airlines on demand side like lower prices.

November 27, 2014

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.

November 25, 2014

What An Unemployment Rate Does Not Tell You

A single statistic like the unemployment rate for Japan, the European Union and the U.S. can be misleading until we look more closely at what it represents.

November 12, 2014

Dodd-Frank: When Is A Law Too Long To Obey?

With debated impact, a little more than half of the thousands of rules necessary for implementing the financial regulation in Dodd-Frank have been written.

November 4, 2014

The Benefits of Perpetual Federal Debt

Very long term federal debt that has no date for redemption like UK First World War bonds and U.S. Revolutionary War debt depend on good public credit.

October 29, 2014

How Chinese Economic Growth Relates to Restaurants and Pilots

China might not fuel world economic growth if instead of a 7 percent real GDP growth rate forecast, we use a regression to the mean of 3.9 percent.