Letters Remain

Category: finance

  • When Money Buys Happiness (or Not)

    After discussingĀ consumer signalling and Geoffrey Miller’s Spent in hisĀ Findings column (mentioned previously), readers of John Tierney’s Lab were asked, List the ten most expensive things (products, services or experiences) that you have ever paid for (including houses, cars, university degrees, marriage ceremonies, divorce settlements and taxes). Then, list the ten items that you have ever…

  • Weather Forecasts and Economic Development

    The economic impact of meteorological forecasts is wide-ranging and, sometimes, unexpected. A few of these influences are described briefly before this (tongue-in-cheek, yet still somewhat logical) piece of advice is offered to developing countries: A study from the mid-1990s [ā€¦] concluded that every dollar invested in weather forecasting services would save $10 in economic losses.…

  • The Mars Bar Unit of Account

    The fluctuating weight of the Mars Bar is quite a contentious issue here in the UK. Answering a query as to whether economists take this into account (and not just price fluctuations) when calculating inflation using the Retail Prices Index, economist Tim Harford offers some entertaining information regarding the Mars Bar unit of account. The Mars…

  • Economic Experts: Insightful, Biased

    Be wary of advice and forecasts from economic ‘experts’, says economist Zachary Karabellā€”not because they are trying to sell their services or because they are lying, but because they truly believe their (unintentionally) skewed opinions. Being wrong in the past is not much of a liability as long as one is right in the present.…

  • Frugality and Entrepreneurship

    Inc. Magazine has a (possibly too lengthy) profile, complete with the expected insights, of Paul Grahamā€”author of Hackers and Painters, co-founder of Y Combinator, and all-round entrepreneurship guru. Cheap meals are, in a strange way, part of Y Combinator’s formula for start-up success. Graham wants founders to spend as little money as possible. Live cheaply…

  • The Economist Daily Chart

    The Daily Chart from The Economist is one of those links where it’s been around so long and is so great that you feel everyone must know about it already. Visualising data from a diverse range of topics, The Daily Charts are almost always impeccably executed and surprising. The RSS feed for the feature is…

  • The Problems with Saving

    In 2007 the average American saved 0.6% of their income. By February of this year that had risen to more than 4%, but in the 1980s it was 10%. With this in mind, Tim Harford asks why are we such awful savers, and what can we do to improve the situation? Behavioral economists [ā€¦] have…

  • Google and ‘The Physics of Clicks’

    Hal Varian is the Chief Economist at Google, engaged primarily in the design of the company’s ‘advertising auctions’; the auctions that happen every time a search takes place in order to determine the advertising that appears on the results page. After introducing us to this concept, Steven Levy looks at Google’s “across-the-board emphasis on engineering,…

  • Consumer Profiling and Credit Card Data Mining

    I’ve always loved reading and learning about data mining and its applications in various fields. Because of this,Ā Charles Duhigg’s comprehensive look at the consumer profiling practices of credit card companies was my favourite read over the weekend. [Researchers] emphasized that the biggest profits didn’t come from people who always paid off their bills but rather…

  • Ending Foreign Aid to Africa

    Foreign aid to Africa has turned the continent into a ‘giant welfare state’ and is one of the direct causes for the rise in poverty rates from 11% to 66% in recent times. This is according to African author and economist Dambisa Moyo as she adds her voice to the growing group of learned economists…