How to assess African poverty? The Afrobarometer provides some answers that generated several perplexing questions. The African Development Bank tells us that growth rates for many African nations hav…
Human Capital: Electricity Matters
After Hurricane Sandy struck my NJ area, a physician friend told me that, with no refrigeration, her vaccine supply spoiled. Imagine her temporary problem as a permanent condition in the developing wo…
An Emerging Market: Cambodia
Our story starts in Russia with McDonald’s French Fry problem. Planning to open the first Moscow McDonald’s in 1990, they realized Russian potatoes were too little. Yes, they tasted good. But the frie…
Election Economics: Too Much or Not Enough Stimulus Spending?
For the first quarter of 2009, GDP declined at a 5.5% rate and, at 7.6% during January, unemployment was rising. With the economy in a tailspin, policy makers wanted to act quickly. Primarily split al…
Plane Train Competition
Should government subsidize a railroad? Our story starts during the 1970s when you could fly from New York to Washington, D.C. on the Eastern shuttle. Eastern left hourly (!) and guaranteed a seat to …
What Can An N-Gram Tell Us?
For laughing and learning this TED talk is wonderful. Having digitized 15 million books, Google enabled us to access a mammoth body of knowledge. However, just reading the entries from the year …
Doha Deadlock
Can you convince a Lubbock, Texas cotton farmer (or his Congressman) to forgo his (maybe $150,000) cotton subsidy? Probably not. After all, these U.S. government payments let him profitably compete in…