From Dior to GM, when we look at golf, sanitizer, and ventilators, the production changes necessitated by the coronavirus depends on the factory.…
The Problem With Picking Peppers
New Mexico has a problem with picking green chile peppers because of fewer agricultural workers and some difficulties with mechanization.…
Two Ways to See a New Restaurant
While Kenji Lopez-Alt perceived his new restaurant through a food writer’s lens, an economist would see it somewhat differently.…
Why Urban Farmers Plant Their Crops in Garages
Using old containers from cargo ships, commercial urban farmers are growing hydroponic mini-lettuces and even strawberries in warehouses and garages.…
What You Don’t See When You Watch a Baseball Game
Those vendors that sell us hot dogs, peanuts, and Coke at a ball game are thinking about a lot more than the food and the score.…
The Shocking Amount of Electricity That Bitcoin Consumes
Although it is a virtual currency, Bitcoin’s huge electricity consumption is very real when we consider the land, labor, and capital its computers require.…
Election Economics 2016: Some Manufacturing Insight
It’s not that we don’t manufacture anything anymore. We just need fewer manufacturing jobs because we are using more technology to increase output.…
The Importance of a Beer Pipeline
A perfect example of how capital makes a firm more efficient, Belgium’s beer pipeline displayed how new technology saves time.…
The Cost of Raising Children
Behavioral economists like Gary Becker say that the family is like a factory where land, labor and capital are combined to “produce” goods like children.…
The Economics of Checklists
I just took a relative to a local hospital’s emergency room. Like Atul Gawande described in his book, The Checklist Manifesto, a nurse first noted “four physiological data points–bod…