At the official exchange rate, Venezuelans pay 5 cents a gallon for premium gasoline while the real price is closer to one half penny a gallon. The dark purple country at the northern tip of South America (below), Venezuela has the…
Microeconomics
One Reason That We Need Gender Equity in TV and Film
Our Monday Gender Issue: Citing “gender inertia,” San Diego University professor Martha Lauzen said that: “If you have all white males working behind the scenes in the film industry, you’re going to get a whole lot of white males up…
How Much Will You Pay For the HOT Lane?
The results of dynamic tolling appear to be surprising the Florida Department of Transportation. Alone in your car on Florida’s I-95, you no longer have to remain in slow moving traffic. For a price, you can enter a HOV (High…
Is the Price of Protecting Pandas Too High?
By Madeleine Vance, guest blogger and student at Kent Place School This summer, I had an incredible opportunity to travel through China including a stop to see the giant pandas in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. Although the pandas didn’t…
B(T)FF… Best Trading Friends Forever
We can say that Mexico believes her top trading partner is the United States because the value of her exports to the US (2013: $370,826,831) added to the value of her imports from the US (2013: $370,746,056) is exceeded by none of her other…
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. Deaton explains that a population could be short because of nutrition or disease. When babies…
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 interview, Ann Beattie said, “I really think people’s bodies are on different clocks. I…
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 controlled 80% of all acreage during the 1870s faced financial collapse 50 years later.…
Problems With Grade Deflation
The number of hours we study is down and our grades are up. Between 1961 and 2003, full time college students diminished their study time from 40 to 27 hours a week. And yet, they have been getting higher grades.…
The Cost of Conservation
By Madeleine Vance, guest blogger and student at Kent Place School. Saving water is supposed to allow us to cut down costs. For the drought-stricken city of Wichita Falls in Texas, this is not the case. In 2013, Wichita Falls’s…