Tag: economics
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The Point of Economists
Following Queen Elizabeth’s question to the economists—Why did no one see the crisis coming?—the Financial Times goes one further asking, What is the point of economists? If the economics profession could not warn the public about the credit crunch and the recession, what is the profession’s raison d’etre? Did this reflect, as some claim, that…
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I, Toaster and The Economies of Production
Doing away with the division of labour and most other economies of production, Thomas Thwaites’ Toaster Project is an experiment to “build a toaster, from scratch—beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99”. Many have mentioned this already (Jason Kottke, Tyler Cowen on Margin Revolution, Radley…
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Exporting Poor Work Environments
After a long time of successfully managing to avoid the blog, I eventually clicked this past week when I was sent Fake Steve Jobs’ reaction to the news that an employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s Chinese ‘manufacturing partners’, committed suicide shortly after reporting a missing iPhone v4 prototype. We can’t make these products in…
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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 […] concluded that every dollar invested in weather forecasting services would save $10 in economic losses.…
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The Declining and Thriving News Magazines
While Time and Newsweek saw double digit falls in revenue last year, The Economist saw similar sized gains—despite increasing subscription rates (previously). The Atlantic discusses this phenomenon, looking in detail at why The Economist is thriving in a market seemingly in decline. The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact…
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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…
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Economic Experts: Insightful, Biased
Be wary of advice and forecasts from economic ‘experts’, says economist Zachary Karabell—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.…
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Prosperity, Freedom, Fertility
When it comes to reproduction, are individuals who strive only for personal gain—as Adam Smith stated in The Wealth of Nations—”led by an invisible hand […] to promote the public interest”? In The Tragedy of the Commons, ecologist Garrett Hardin suggested not and called for further government intervention to help control rising populations. Recent studies,…
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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…
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Can Technology Solve Our Climate Problems?
After reading Cambridge physicist David MacKay’s much lauded Sustainable Energy (free download available), the FT Economist Tim Harford worries that we are “too complacent about technological fixes for the twin problems of climate change and finite oil and gas reserves”. Harford suggests that if we contemplate the idea that technological progress may not solve these…