Macroeconomics

January 21, 2014

The Trade-Offs of Prolonging Life

From guest blogger, Mariana Do Carmo, student at Yale University. What if prolonging life results in prolonging not only your suffering but also that of others? […]

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 […]

January 13, 2014

Marrying Up in China

“There is an opinion that A quality guys will find B quality women, B  quality guys will find C quality women, and C quality men will find D quality women…The people left […]

January 12, 2014

Which College Grads Have Unemployment Problems?

With a 6.7% unemployment rate and 74,000 jobs created for December, are you okay if you have a bachelor’s degree? I discovered some answers in a […]

January 11, 2014

Happy Birthday to a Great Father (of our economy)

When you sing happy birthday to Alexander Hamilton today, please just think of an upward sloping (logarithmic) economic growth line:   Today, 257–or maybe 259–years ago […]

January 5, 2014

One Reason That Geography Matters

Have you ever looked closely at Japan and the United Kingdom? Described by geographer Jared Diamond in a fascinating podcast, they look remarkably similar. Today Japan […]

January 4, 2014

Do You Live in a Popular State?

Listening to Bloomberg news the other morning, I heard that Atlas Van Lines just came out with their annual migration study. The radio report said New […]

January 3, 2014

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. […]

October 22, 2013

Restaurant Economics: How to Make 1500 Meals a Day

At 2 am, converging at the delivery entrance of Balthazar in NY’s SoHo are mussels from New Zealand, russet potatoes from Idaho, steak from the Midwest and chicken breast […]

May 16, 2012

Learning From the Low End

Sometimes it’s better to be at the bottom than the top. Explaining, Harvard’s Clay Christensen starts his story with the huge integrated steel firms and ends […]