With marijuana legalization, Canada has had to revise 60 years of its Gross National Product (GDP) to avoid misleading numbers.…
What Santa Would Add to the GDP
Estimating Santa’s salary is a specific task that takes us to the broader issue of whether the GDP should include unpaid work.…
Weekly Roundup: From Good Voices to Bad Marriages
Our everyday economics includes GDP, human capital, price system, public goods, taxes, gender pay gap, externalities, subsidies, marriage economics and ROI.…
How To Price a Nobel Prize
Shown by auctions of Nobel prize medals from recipients like Simon Kuznets and James Watson, through markets, the price system conveys information.…
Should GDP Include Illegal Drug Deals?
In 1987, Italy decided to include its “off-the-books” economy in its GDP. The result was an 18% boost. Now, further complying with EU accounting regulations, Italy will add illegal drugs, …
Winning World War II With Numbers
The year was 1940. Seeing that war might be imminent, President Roosevelt approached the president of General Motors. Wartime conversion was the issue. To become an “arsenal of democracy,”…
Home Economics
What if we think of a household as a production unit that does child care, gardening, cooking and cleaning? And, if the work in the home is “outsourced” when people hire a nanny, a housekeeper, a gard…
Home Work
More unemployed means more people at home. One study asked, what are the unemployed doing? During every day’s “foregone market work hours,” unemployed people are occupied with home p…
How Are We Spending Our Money?
Has the recession changed how we spend? Here are the numbers that give some answers according to a summary from Michael Mandel, former BusinessWeek chief economist.: Since the 4th quarter of 2007, we …